Monday, October 13, 2014

The Attribution Problem: Can It Be Solved?

I can tell you a bunch of new tech upstarts that think so, some of whom have developed technology that has since been snatched up by the likes of AOL and Google. Marketers have traditionally attributed a customer conversion to a person's "last click" before purchasing. This means that the last ad medium with which the customer engaged before conversion receives most if not all of the credit for driving the sale. We are exposed to advertising on a 24/7/365 basis, and oftentimes we will have seen 20 ads across multiple channels, both online and offline, before finally clicking on an ad and making a purchase.

Visual IQ, Convertro (AOL), and Adometry (Google) have garnered several million dollars of venture investment in an effort to address the issue. They have also signed up large enterprise customers willing to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to drive small increments of improvement to their marketing ROI. We should keep an eye on these companies - while it seems somewhat inconceivable that this issue can be addressed with any real efficacy, the impressive customer rosters that these vendors have accumulated suggests that some pretty important people in the marketing world are buyers.

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