Forrester Research Builds a Business Case for Attribution

One of the beautiful things about choosing digital marketing as a career is the ability to measure everything that a consumer does, and take action on it. There sometimes is little left to the imagination with online marketing. However, there is a great shift that is forcing digital marketers to evolve their thinking.

“Tried and true” measurement approaches aren’t working like they once did for measuring consumer interaction with brands given the market is seemingly overrun with more apps, devices and platforms than ever before. In this case, by “tried and true” I’m referring to last click analytics. Last click analytics gives 100% of the credit of a transaction to the last click prior to a purchase. The last click approach worked for years as consumers moved through the conversion funnel in a very linear fashion.  This linear form of online shopping has been torn down, and thrown away with the introduction of social networks like Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter. Consumers have adapted these platforms at an unprecedented rate; however, measurement approaches have lagged.

Attribution measurement (the practice of dividing credit for a given action across multiple interactions) is one of the ways that some marketers have been measuring digital for a while (six years for us at Rosetta). For one of our Financial Services clients, Rosetta decreased cost of spend by 11% while increasing conversions by 1%; a great example of how one can optimize spend to be more efficient when we consider the impact of each channel holistically. However, brands resist for many reasons.  Forrester’s latest report entitled “Making the Case for Interactive Attribution in Your Organization,” does a very nice job of outlining key challenges for marketers, and how to overcome them. For me, the biggest passion point is around the fundamental shift that is necessary for brands to be able to accept this measurement approach. As long as organizations incent their marketing teams on the success of their silo, there is little motivation for a successful last click tactic to give up any credit to another tactic. There are tremendous shifts in value creation online, and those will require all of us to take some data driven leaps of faith to fully capture this value.  Forrester’s article starts to lay a framework for this evolution.

Who is up for the challenge with us?