The Myth: Even if it’s not perfect, last-touch attribution gives you some idea of what’s working.
The Reality: Last-touch attribution gives you the illusion of insight, and can lead to the wrong conclusions entirely.
Many marketers use platform-provided last-touch conversion or revenue attribution because its all that is available. That could be for a myriad of reasons. Perhaps the biggest reason is there hasn’t been a good alternative that is effective and affordable. As an industry, we know that over-reliance on last-touch measurement skews budgets toward bottom-funnel channels and undercuts long-term growth. We know it favors channels like paid search and retargeting and undervalues channels like online video and audio. And it doesn’t even count offline channels, so we’re left to assume or guess how those channels perform within the overall mix. We end up chasing what’s trackable, not what’s effective.
It reminds me of an analytics joke a colleague once shared. A man was in an alleyway behind a restaurant, searching under a lamppost for his hat. A passerby stopped and asked him:
“What are you looking for?
He said “my hat.”
“Is this where you lost your hat?”
“No, I lost it in the restaurant.. But it’s dark in there, this is where the light is.”
The light in the alley is not going to move the hat to the alley. The tracking of clickable units is not going to move real results either. So what is the solution? We believe more nimble, modeled results available throughout the entirety of a campaign that enable in-flight optimizations are the answer. With the major advances in both tech and AI, why shouldn’t we be able to solve this?
Have you ever seen great media undervalued because it didn’t show up in the “last-touch” results?
We’d love to hear about it.
#DataVsDogma #MarketingMyths #AttributionModeling #MediaAnalytics #MarketingMeasurement #Incrementality #ArsXMachina
