There is a newer version of this report available: The State of Marketing Attribution 2017

As customer journeys become increasingly complex and fast-paced, it’s imperative for marketers to understand the effectiveness of their campaigns and how each channel contributes to the end conversion.

This State of Marketing Attribution report, produced by Econsultancy in association with AdRoll, explores current adoption levels and types of strategies organisations are using. The study evaluates tools and processes employed as well as the potential barriers to effective use of the capability.

The report, which is based on a survey of almost 600 in-house and supply-side respondents, discusses how well companies are leveraging their data to attract, convert and grow their customer base.

Respondents were based in the UK, France and Germany, and the report compares and contrasts the three countries.

Key topics covered

  • The multichannel challenge – despite the increasingly crucial role that attribution plays, organisations carrying out attribution across the majority of their campaigns are still in the minority. Find out the reasons why and tips on how to remedy this.
  • What others are doing with attribution – benchmark your organisations against your peers by finding out which methods and technologies they are using.
  • The skills and training needed for successful attribution.
  • The regional variations between the UK, France and Germany in terms of the state of attribution.

 

Key findings

  • While four in five organisations carry out marketing attribution, less than a third (31%) do so on the majority of or all their campaigns and analyse results.
  • The issues which restrict marketers’ ability to carry out attribution or implement it properly are mainly around a lack of knowledge (58%), lack of time (44%) and technology limitations (41%).
  • Organisations are lagging behind when it comes to more complex attribution models, with nearly half still using last-click models. More worryingly, a similar proportion use first-click, a less intuitive form of attribution.
  • While algorithmic and custom attribution feature among the most effective models (96% and 89% respectively claim they are ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ effective), less than a quarter (23%) of responding organisations use these methods.
  • Around half of marketers choose off-the-shelf vendor technology for marketing attribution, while 44% opt for custom-built technology. Over two-fifths (42%) are still resorting to manual attribution with the use of spreadsheet data.
  • When asked about areas with the biggest issues and gaps, creating a culture of measurement and accuracy (59%), campaign tracking/tagging (56%) and data validation/normalisation (56%) were cited as top-three challenges.
  • Nearly 60% of responding organisations don’t action the insights they get from attribution.