Advanced attribution is one of the most popular topics in the analytics world today. While marketers have been generating substantial incremental ROI with attribution, there have also been numerous situations where pricey attribution solutions have not delivered the promised value.
Advanced attribution is the act of taking a desired event (such as an online hotel booking) and assigning value to each of the marketing touchpoints that drove that event. For example, suppose a guest sees a banner ad for a hotel. Later, that customer uses Google to search for that hotel, clicks on a paid link, arrives at the hotel’s website and books a stay. In that case, advanced attribution assigns value to the banner view and the clicked-on search keyword that drove the website visit and transaction. Getting this right is important! By adding up all of the value assigned to the banner ad and all of the value assigned to the keyword, we can calculate the ROI of the overall banner ad campaign or keyword buy. Once we have the ROI, we can make optimization decisions. It is also worth noting that this calculation happens “under the hood”—a function provided by most ad technology available today.
via Tracking Hotel Marketing with Advanced Attribution, by Andy Fisher.
