What are the benefits of multi-touch attribution?

There are an estimated 3.5 million Google searches per day and 1.2 trillion per year. Added to that, the average consumer spend three hours on their mobile per day, with YouTube recently hitting 1 billion hours of viewing per day.

With all this digital traffic, marketers are having difficulties tracking individual customers across the various channels available.

What technologies are out there to ensure that digital campaigns are reaching their target? And what results can you expect from attribution?

Econsultancy and Visual IQ hosted a webinar to answer these questions…

Opportunities to reach, track and measure have never been greater

While consumers are using different channels to explore and research their purchases they are leaving behind digital footprints. Digital footprints make it possible for marketers to reach their consumers with personalised messaging.

Consumers have grown savvy when it comes to the power of digital marketing and its capabilities. They no longer want to see generic marketing efforts. Instead consumers expect a more personalised experience.

Tracking this creates a challenge

However, with these opportunities and abilities to reach consumers in a more personalised fashion comes new challenges:

Different metrics and KPIs across paid, owned and earned channels
Correlating online activity with offline activities such as point of sale and in-store sales
Determining activity across channels and devices tied to one individual (de-duplicating individuals)

De-duplicating individuals across all the various channels and devices is especially challenging and poses a problem when trying to track and personalise.

Can multi-touch attribution offers bring this together?

Multi-touch attribution (MTA), according to VisualIQ product marketing manager Moira Freeman, is an “attribution approach that determines the influence of your marketing efforts on consumers so that marketers can optimise spend and improve the consumer experience. It has the ability to de-duplicate all user IDs associated with an individual user.”

MTA has several advantages. The first being, accuracy. This is especially true with the complex algorithmic models of MTA which assign fractional credit for every touchpoint and also use predictive analytics to produce granular media spend recommendations.

MTA also has the advantage of frequency and granularity. It works at a near real-time frequency and can deliver optimisation recommendations down to the keyword, placement or creative level.

Lastly, MTA can identify your audience which is vital for ‘people-based marketing’. MTA’s ability to de-duplicate user IDs across multiple channels down to a individual user level makes for a more accurate, user-level view of the customer journey.

It’s not just insight – attribution reduces your cost per acquisition (CPA)

One example given by VisualIQ’s Matt Butterfield was the potential to measure Facebook advertising in a way that previously has caused problems.

Facebook can provide access to every Facebook impression across all Facebook properties at a user ID level. By connecting that with other sources of data, brands like O2 have seen impressive benefits.

A pilot programme with the telco produced a 49% decrease in CPA and improved conversion rates.