The Dilemma of Attribution In Digital Marketing

At this point in the marketing world, some are less suspicious of conventional advertising than digital. In other words: what some ask of online advertising is not required of traditional media. As we have a more remarkable ability to trace user behavior through analyzing their behavior on social networks and web pages, many companies seek to make the results of campaigns in these areas more reliable and predictable. “How many sales are you going to assure me?” Some ask. “How many registrations am I going to get?” Others insist. It does not matter if the recommended investment is less than the cost of a radio spot, a canvas on a building, or a billboard at an urban intersection. If digital, we require that sales attribution (who claims success) be accurate.

What Can Go Wrong In An Attribution Process

The terrain of the allocation is swampy. We want to be confident in knowing how many conversion processes have occurred in our online store thanks to a successful ad on a mobile media network or what traffic is due directly to a series of dynamic creatives in a particular social network. However, there are factors that we must take into account to clarify what the data offers us.

It is not easy to associate a direct purchase with an advertising campaign. The regulations require that payment operations be carried out on secure platforms managed by financial institutions or intermediary companies, such as Paypal. Once the client leaves our environment to pay the cost of the operation, they may not return to our site and leave us without closing the circle of the sale in our analytics. Likewise, it could not complete the purchase due to a bad experience, an unexpected cut in the service, or a bad design of that service outside of us. The attribution wobbles a bit.

On other occasions, relating a transaction to a campaign is something that we must associate with a specific impact (for example, the memory of a banner that was shown to us in a recent period) or with a repetitive result (the famous retargeting). Conversion pixels were invented to correct the gap between seeing an ad and making a purchase decision, which can be fair or biased, depending on how they are configured. Can we consider that seeing a campaign a week ago is still decisive for us to land on the advertiser’s site to make a purchase, or is this movement the consequence of a set of elements, such as the effect of conventional media?

Is Precision Lacking In Digital Marketing?

All of the above does not mean that we should distrust digital marketing. On the contrary, we must consider that the attributions of one environment and another are different, and the audiences, too.

Never before have we had more data and greater precision in knowing the results of our campaigns. We see their ability to generate traffic, which creatives work best, which elements attract attention, which calls to action work and which do not, and what path our customers take to reach the shopping cart. We can even use quick action tools like discount codes or tracking links to enrich the information we have about our customers. That power does not have a poster hanging from a banner or a brochure attached with a brush to the car’s windshield wiper.

Still, there is mistrust. If it’s digital, it must be accurate. If it is conventional, it should only generate visibility. Well, neither one nor the other. Each format, support, and space plays in a different field but with complementary objectives, often aiming at different profiles. Choosing the media mix is ​​critical, but the key is comparing the right metrics before and after launching a campaign.

Also Read: 10 Reasons You Need A Digital Marketing Strategy In 2022