by Alex Ho

(Image source: StorySet )

Table of Contents

Advertising Attribution

Advertising Attribution aims to determine the contribution of each individual ad campaign touch point for a certain marketing goal (e.g. make a purchase, click on a banner, install mobile App).

There 3 reasons that it is difficult to correctly measure the marketing performances across multiple touch points

<1> Each Ad platform tends to credit same individual conversions to themselves

• Advertisers tend to simultaneously place multiple Ads in multiple channels.
• Each Ad platform (e.g. Facebook, Google) provides different attribution methods for the advertisers.
• (Take e-commerce scenario as example) If we add the converted GMV from various ads in each channels, the subtotal number could be higher than 100% of the real total GMV.

<2> Much traffic could not be correctly attributed because of the measurement limitation across devices or operating systems

• It makes the attribution model falsely credit a chunk of conversions to “direct traffic”
• Then it could make advertiser underestimate the performance from certain marketing channels.

<3> Data signal loss due to emerging privacy policies

• More and more privacy policies formulated by tech firms has made ads platforms more difficult to collect 3rd-party user data (compared with what they were able to before).