Attribution, hold onto your metaphorical hat.
For years, the art of determining which marketing effort led to a sale has been performed inside a black box that may have contained as much magic as science.
Marketers have had the unenviable task of finding out, for instance, what impacted all those people to buy those blue sneakers online and in physical stores during two weeks in May in Boston.
There have been two main approaches. The venerable approach of marketing (or media) modeling mix (MMM) is top-down, with a focus on overall budget spend versus sales that also includes large factors like weather. Born before there was a World Wide Web, it’s largely offline-focused and has long time horizons.
The other is digital attribution, based on all those trackable online actions like clicks. Early attribution schemes like first- or last-touch — where the credit for a sale goes to the first or the last touch point — have largely given way in the age of multichannel marketing to multitouch attribution (MTA).
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