Data is the New Currency to power Attribution
Multi-touch attribution fails when marketers try to read intent from siloed channels. The data management platform fixes that by centralizing first- and third-party behavioral data into a single customer view, then activating unified audiences across paid search, display, email, and social. Treat the DMP as the cornerstone of your data strategy first; attribution modeling follows from it, not before it.
In English, please
When someone buys something after seeing a search ad, opening an email, and later clicking a retargeted banner, which of those moments actually gets credit for making the sale happen? That question is what marketers call attribution, and in digital advertising it's one of the most misunderstood ideas -- because answering it well requires seeing a customer's entire path, not just the last click before checkout.
The obstacle: each marketing channel usually keeps its own separate records. The email tool has one log, the search-ad platform has another, the display and social tools have their own -- and none of them talk to each other. Without merging those records, a business only ever sees scattered fragments of a customer's journey, which turns the credit-splitting question into a guess.
The fix described here is what the ad-tech world calls a 'data management platform' -- essentially a system for pulling all that scattered customer information into one place: data a company collects on its own, plus data bought from outside providers, combined into a single profile per person instead of several disconnected ones spread across tools. With that, a business can follow one person across every channel and device rather than piecing together partial views.
Once the data sits in one place, it can flow back out to sharpen the ads themselves, personalize the website, and better target the next campaign -- and the results of those efforts loop back into the same central store, feeding the next round of decisions. That two-way flow is what makes it possible to actually calculate how much credit each touchpoint deserves, rather than assuming it.
None of this happens overnight: it takes sustained investment in centralizing data before attribution numbers can actually be trusted. A note added later points out that a decade on, the hardest version of the same problem moved to commerce media -- advertising sold inside online stores rather than out on the open web -- where attribution runs into a stricter set of limits, a harder case covered in a separate follow-up piece.
On the back of the cross-device thought leadership piece I’ve put together a few weeks ago, I wanted to expand the topic by showcasing the importance of the Data Management Platform (DMP) to power the most frequently misunderstood concept of Attribution.
According to Wikipedia, the purpose of marketing attribution is to quantify the influence each advertising impression has on a consumer’s decision to make a purchase decision, or convert. In the world of digital advertising and programmatic marketing, data has grown exponentially in both volume and importance. The use and utilization of large data sets in predicting outcomes, understanding audiences and breaking down media silos is more widespread now than ever before. A new era of marketing campaigns which engage audiences and create one-to-one brand experiences through smart use of audience data are the focus of many successful marketers today.
At the heart of this data revolution sits the data management platform (DMP). The DMP gives publishers, marketers & brands new ways to centralize and manage their customer databases, analyze their marketing efforts, inform content management systems, and power advertising platforms. DMPs also offer new capabilities in audience targeting, creative optimization, attribution and cross channel user identification. A marketer’s data no longer needs to sit and operate in silos. The DMP enables seamless and safe transport of data across multiple channels, platforms and devices, from one ecosystem to the next to maximize audience impact.
Vast amounts of behavioral data, both first- and third-party, sets Lotame apart from the competition. Ability to look at all touch points of the consumer journey by gathering all data insights and overlaying them with 2nd, 3rd party behaviors gives 360 degree view of the customer profile, thus powering the attribution modeling and optimization. The DMP gives marketers the ability to create centralised customer insights. For the first time a marketer can create audiences using multiple data sources, and profile those audiences based on key sociodemographics, interest and actions, providing a huge strategic advantage in the ongoing planning with apprehended data signals flowing into Lotame Insights, for detailed analyses. Understanding the entire conversion path across the whole marketing mix eliminates the accuracy challenge of analyzing data from siloed channels. Marketers around the world leverage Lotame’s DMP to learn more about their current customers and increase the performance of their digital ad campaigns, as well as provide visibility into and the chance to optimize a customer’s path to conversion, which effectively fuels attribution modeling.
To power data driven decisions, publishers, marketers & brands are inclined to use Lotame Insights, an audience-driven campaign optimization solution that takes the guesswork out of creating high-performing audiences to maximize audience impact. It delivers campaign performance metrics, robust campaign monitoring capabilities and decision tools for improving campaign performance. Combining audience-level data, granular behavior data, campaign-level and impression-level data from manually created campaigns with ad server reporting and log files, Lotame Insights dissects this data to drive campaign optimization, targeting decisions and attribution analyses.
The DMP is then used as a centralized data activation center, transporting unified audiences into various activation channels: creative optimization solutions, website optimization tools and conversion funnel management providers. Visibility into what influences the audience, when and to what extent, allows marketers to optimize media spend for conversions and compare the value of different marketing channels, including paid and organic search, email, affiliate marketing, display ads, social media and more. Finally the reporting and analytics gained from these activation channels are delivered through the DMP in order to better inform future planning and strategy as well as cross-channel attribution.
To conclude, multi-touch attribution doesn’t happen overnight. Invest time and effort to formulate your data strategy. Consider DMP as a corner stone and first step forward for data assets centralization, which underpins apprehension of your consumer journey touch points to power attribution modeling.
A decade later, the hardest attribution questions live in commerce media: closed-loop attribution and its limits — the retail media measurement standards.
Happy Data Mining!