While much has been said about complementary media strategies, the secret to making it truly work is cross-channel attribution. And to make cross-channel attribution successful, marketers must think about two things: 1) the technology used to make it happen; and 2) the role of business-critical elements (media, marketing and so on) and how they work together.
First, let’s look at multi-touch attribution (MTA) and marketing mix modeling (MMM) and what they can tell marketers.
MTA vs. MMM: What about both?
Recently, there’s been a lot of noise around cross-channel attribution, with vendors launching new products or features — whether it’s marketing mix modeling (MMM) on top of a multi-touch attribution (MTA) platform or linear TV attribution based on traditional econometric modeling.
MTA and MMM models are critical components to making cross-channel attribution happen, but there are pros and cons to each.
An MTA model answers the question, “What is the true contribution of a measurable marketing action?” It can tell you whether a specific action changed the outcome of a customer conversion and, if so, by how much.
Where MTA is constrained is in providing a full view of the customer journey, especially in relation to how offline impacts online.
An MMM model provides a longer-term view of the online and offline impact of marketing actions. It does this by looking at the statistical relationship between spend/aggregate actions and business outcomes (typically sales). For MMMs to be successful, an extensive time-series of granular data is needed — usually two to three years’ worth.
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