Thursday, July 13, 2017

Google Attribute - the Next Iteration of Attribution

Google recently hosted their Google Marketing Next conference in San Francisco and unveiled their latest attempt at debunking final-click attribution. Named "Google Attribution," the service aims to capture and link upper and mid-funnel interactions.

The latest software is an evolution on their 2014 acquisition of Adometry, which yielded Attribute 360, an enterprise level attribution software. Google Attribute incorporates data from Google Analytics, Google AdWords, and DoubleClick to help marketers understand what efforts got the ball rolling for a customer. An upgrade from Attribute 360, Google Attribute attempts to incorporate
all touchpoints a customer has whereas Attribute 360 only tracked the last 4.

This has several implications, the most obvious being that it clarifies the picture on how customers are interacting with a brand. This not only helps marketers better understand the customer journey, but also gives valuable data to inform bidding strategies.

Google Attribute allows marketers to design, test, and compare different attribution models side-by-side to determine which models yield the best results.

It will be interesting to monitor the success of Google Attribute and see how companies use this service, as the whole concept of attribution is trying to make a fuzzy concept concrete and measurable. The mass incorporation of data into the marketing world is a double-edged sword. It can definitely be used to uncover certain insights, but it also gives us a false sense of certainty around things which are not necessarily concrete.

If companies can demonstrate using this service to increase conversion while decreasing cost, I'll be very interested in understanding what process they went through.




Google Attribution - one step closer towards attributing spend?

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