{"id":113597,"date":"2015-11-03T20:22:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-04T01:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/bad-science-common-pitfalls-in-attribution-and-digital-planning\/"},"modified":"2024-12-21T05:55:17","modified_gmt":"2024-12-21T10:55:17","slug":"bad-science-common-pitfalls-in-attribution-and-digital-planning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-gb\/insights\/blog\/paid-media\/bad-science-common-pitfalls-in-attribution-and-digital-planning\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad science: common pitfalls in attribution and digital planning"},"content":{"rendered":"

The digital marketing industry continues to struggle with its interpretation of \u2018attribution\u2019, and how to achieve it. In its most basic sense, attribution means determining the role that any given channel plays in informing and influencing the customer journey. But in an increasingly complex and fragmented marketing landscape where the consumer journey flits between a tangled web of digital, offline, social, paid and earned media channels, quantifying the contribution of individual touch points is increasingly tricky. Too often, marketers exercise poor execution in their attribution strategy, and as a result, they rely on the old adage that \u201chalf my marketing works, I just don\u2019t know which half\u201d! Consequently, marketing spend, and the overall sales cycle, is not optimised nearly as much as it could be. There are two huge challenges facing marketers: the extreme difficulty in tracking cross-device behaviour, and understanding the genuine incremental contribution of a channel or campaign. Sophia Evgeniou, Head of Customer Acquisition at House of Fraser, recently told Econsultancy: \u201cAttribution is still a difficult topic for many companies as there isn\u2019t one set way to attribute and this can be an extremely unsettling discussion point for any business.\u201d Let\u2019s examine three of the common pitfalls that marketers face, in the hope that we can shed some light on them and offer up solutions…<\/p>\n

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  1. Cross-device attribution<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    A\u00a0study by Facebook<\/a>\u00a0revealed that over 60% of online adults in the US use at least two mobile devices every day, with close to one quarter using three devices. Switching devices is also a significant part of the purchase journey. More than 40% of online adults sometimes start an activity on one device only to finish it on another. These trends present new opportunities for cross-device attribution and open up significant challenges in understanding consumer behaviour and usage patterns.<\/p>\n

    \"Facebook

    Source facebook.com<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

    On the face of it, smartphone traffic converts poorly and cross-device attribution remains a pipedream for many European advertisers. Clearly, the savvy marketers out there know this is a misnomer. A\u00a0recent study<\/a>\u00a0by comScore showed that 80% of local searches on mobile phones convert into sales. This makes sense in light of the top searches cited in the report: restaurants (23%), auto service establishments\/dealerships (10%) and arts and entertainment (9%). From an ecommerce perspective, those who have the ability to track their logged-in users can understand cross-device behaviour, and hence devise an attribution model that accounts for the impact of mobile. For everybody else, there is external help at hand. Some vendors have devised ways to help marketers with cross-device attribution and Google Adwords’ Attribution reports<\/a> and metric \u2018cross device conversions\u2019 is a good place to start.<\/p>\n

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    1. Correlation isn\u2019t enough<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
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