Attribution at the Google Marketing Next 2017 - Innovations Keynote
Technology should make our lives and our marketing efforts easier, right?
The age old question businesses always ask - Is my marketing working?
How do you know which of the many interactions you have with a person, across search, display, video, your site or your app really mattered?
How do you measure an Ad that someone sees on one device, when they purchase on another device?
Truth be told, existing attribution tools that try to help marketers answer these questions just aren't cutting it. They're often difficult to set up. They tend to lose track of the customer journey when people move between devices and they aren't well integrated, so it's a challenge to use the results to improve your marketing. As a result, many marketers are stuck measuring their performance using last-click.
This year, Google claims that they will be solving the attribution problem! Thanks Google!
Whether your business is large or small, you will now be able to understand if your marketing is working or so Google claim.
Drum roll - Google have launched Google Attribution.
It is a new tool that measures the impact of each marketing touch point across multiple channels, across multiple devices and is said to make it really easy to take action.
Taking advantage of data already available in tools like AdWords, Google Analytics and DoubleClick Search.
Google Attribution for the first time makes it easy to get a single view of the path to purchase. To make your life simpler, Google Attribution will also unify the existing attribution features in all these tools. Best of all, it will be available to all advertisers, at
no cost. Say What - no cost, thanks Google!
If you're wondering how a single solution can work for every size of advertiser, Google have their enterprise version - Attribution 360, the premium offering.
It's designed to meet the data integration and modeling needs of Googles largest advertisers, and can measure ads from DoubleClick Campaign Manager.
MY OPINION
While Google looks to improve Attribution it must be highlighted that they are primarily doing it for their own tools, which is what you would expect from an advertising supplier. However the fact that they are integrating this with DoubleClick shows that they are looking to include attribution from other sources that plug into the DoubleClick platform.
Attribution is already changing the way online advertising is being bought, with more budget being shared across channels. In most cases this is currently being performed manually but from what we have seen during Google Marketing Next 2017, the roadmap is to certainly automate advertising planning and buying using all of the signals Google has available. This automation coupled with their machine learning algorithms and attribution will certainly take us closer to answering the age old question. Is my marketing working?
SOURCE: Google Attribution
Within the Google Attribution Tool, Google have introduced and branded their own attribution type - Data Driven Attribution.
They say switching to data-driven attribution allows you to value all of your ads and is the best choice for most marketers. Data-driven attribution uses your account's conversion data to calculate how much credit each touchpoint deserves. Google claims that they can do this at scale because of their investment in machine learning.
Learn more about Data Driven Attribution here.
Google Attribution is in Beta - more information from their Blog can be found here.
Please find some Quick links to all Google Marketing Next 2017 posts below;