Marketing attribution: How many are actually doing it?

Though the headline might suggest it, I’m not going to draw a tawdry analogy.

Simply, let’s look at a few charts from Econsultancy’s new report, the State of Marketing Attribution in the UK, France and Germany, published in association with AdRoll.

By Ben Davis September 22nd 2016 10:15

66% of companies undertake some form of attribution and analyse their results

The headline statistic is a heartening one. 66% of company respondents said they carry out attribution on all or some campaigns and analyse the results.

Though the agency sample size is a third of that for company respondents, a disparity is notable in the results, with agencies less confident of their clients’ competence.

Nearly a fifth of agency respondents (18%) say their clients are carrying out attribution but are not sure how to effectively analyse results.

UK companies not particularly confident of agency impartiality in attribution

24% of company respondents said they use their media agency to carry out marketing attribution.

Respondents could select multiple options here, with vendor technology the most popular (51%), followed by custom-built tech (44%) and spreadsheets/manual (42%).

Of those respondents that said they used their media agency for attribution, UK companies were particularly sceptical when it comes to impartiality.

32% of UK respondents said they were ‘not very confident’ of their agency’s impartiality when it comes to marketing attribution, and a further 44% were only ‘quite confident’.

This is quite startling, and speaks to the pressing need for transparency and accountability in media agency land (amid reports of overcharging and lack of strategy/skills).

Display feels the wrath of attribution

When respondents were asked what channels they include in their marketing attribution, email (71%) and display (64%) were clear favourites.

These were followed by content (58%), paid search (55%), social (54%), affiliate (52%), paid social (42%), SEO (41%), mobile apps (25%) and video (24%).

And the result of this marketing attribution analysis?

28% reported they were increasing spend across all or some channels, 46% reported decreasing spend across all or some channels.

What is particularly striking though is that of those decreasing budgets based on attribution analysis, over half (54%) report doing so for display advertising (see chart below).

Again, this stat shows that companies are intent on gaining more oversight of channels such as display, which may have previously seemed like a black box to some clients or a line added to a media plan.

This is just a taster from this new report, but there’s plenty more revealing data to dig into and many tangential conclusions to be made about the state of measurement and media in digital marketing.

Subscribers can download the report now.