Marketers Don’t Know How to Deal With Their Data

Typical marketers are advertising in a limited world through Google and Facebook. They can’t get access to their complete data, so they don’t have the familiarity necessary to get the full value out of it. You only see part of the picture generated by these platforms, and it’s not unreasonable to assume that some bias could be present toward user behavior that favors the ad products they’re selling.

Convenience

Sometimes the decision to use last-touch attribution comes down to convenience. It’s much easier to track the last touch that occurred before the conversion than to follow customers through their full journey. However, this method ignores many factors that influence the purchase decision process. You may end up focusing your advertising resources on channels that aren’t as effective, simply because they tend to attract higher volumes of last-touch traffic.

Implementing multi-touch attribution requires more expensive solutions that are capable of handling the data coming in from all of your sources. You may use multiple demand side platforms for advertising that complicate matters or need to standardize the data received from your vendors.

The Benefits of Multi-Touch Attribution

Multi-touch attribution may be difficult to implement, but it’s well worth the effort. One of the biggest advantages of this approach is gaining clear visibility into everything your customers do before they decide they’re going to make a purchase.

You can use this visibility to determine where you should invest your ad spend and whether you need to give any particular area more attention. You may discover that your customers enjoy shopping from their smartphones far more than they do other channels, which can guide you into mobile-first strategies.

Brand awareness campaigns and other strategies that take place early in the buyer’s journey get the representation they need. You may set up opportunities that lead to conversions at the beginning stages and be able to scale them up to drive growth.

The data gathered from multi-touch attribution also sheds light on your last-touch channels. You can see whether they are as effective as last-touch attribution seems to think, or if they actually end up comparing poorly to other methods.

Your ROI calculations go to the granular level, with the ability to look downstream or upstream to see what’s going on. Your conversion rate optimization efforts can use a data-driven approach that allows you to improve every touch point available. Since you can assign a dollar value to every channel that exists in your sales funnel, you can drill down and understand the cost-effective solutions for each phase.

You may also be able to incorporate offline data into your multi-touch attribution measurements, depending on the system you use. This touch point is one of the most difficult ones to track, but the information you gather is invaluable.

Multi-touch attribution empowers your organization to get more from your ad spend. Get the visibility you need to effectively run omnichannel campaigns that guide your customers from start to finish.