Google Launches Google Attribution

Digital marketing gets more and more complex as the size of the business grows. As a business expands they start incorporating more and more channels in order to reach a wider audience.

These channels can work in silos, feed off of one another or in some cases cannibalise one another. So how do you know which channel combinations work and which do not? You could look at your top conversion paths or analyse your assisted conversion channels which give you a general overview but not the full scope of attribution.

If you're a company that relies on last-click attribution to dictate how you will allocate your marketing spend and think that you have all the bases covered, you're probably missing out on plenty of customers and paying a higher CPA for the ones you do get.

A perfect illustration of why last click attribution is a fail

Source: Marketoonist

Google launches a new attribution tool

At Google’s Marketing Next conference, the company has announced a new beta for Google Attribution, a free tool for the purpose of examining the role your different marketing strategies play in customer purchasing decisions. Regardless of device or marketing channel, Google wants Attribution to be the go-to tool for evaluating marketing campaigns.

By creating a tight loop between strategy, content, advertising spend and feedback, Google aims to make the tool attractive to marketers that feel last-click models don’t sufficiently explain customer behaviour. Up until recently, most marketers using Google Analytics would credit any sale to the last touchpoint their company had with a customer.

This flawed strategy allows marketers to quantitatively evaluate marketing campaigns, but with companies using this as a performance metric, some channel managers are benefiting more than others.

What Google attribution will offer

Google Attribution will make use of new machine learning-powered methods to enable marketers to model the relative contribution of disparate advertising efforts. This could be a much more informative method of evaluation and give marketers a 360 perspective of how customers see and interact with the business. For example, if we step out of the spreadsheet and reporting world and into the real world.

We could easily make a case for video ads, banner ads, emails and other materials customers engage with all work in consonance to drive conversions and not just give final paid search or direct traffic conversion all the credit. If you're a manager of a brand awareness channel like display or social media you're probably smiling from ear to ear right now, its time your efforts get the recognition they deserve.

Google Attribution should give marketers a better picture of their overall marketing efforts and help facilitate a more accurate cost-benefit analysis. Since the tool is in beta and not available in most countries outside the US I've yet to play around with it.

Once we do, I'll definitely post a full review. So, for now, Google Attribution remains in beta, but the company has stated that advertisers should expect a deeper roll out in the near future.

In the meantime, you can visit the site at https://www.google.com/analytics/attribution/ and sign up for a release notification.

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Tags: Data Analysis, google analytics, Google Data Studio, reporting