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If their brands are to succeed in 2024 and beyond, marketers should stop using attribution models and return to a measurement model from 1985.
“Attribution is completely broken today, but we still use it like we used to,” says Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SparkToro.
He shared this message during his recent visit to CMI Live for the episode “Can We Really ‘Measure’ Marketing Anymore?”
Read on (or watch the video) to hear what Rand has to say about how marketers got to this point and how you can move to more meaningful measurement in 2024.
Take a trip back in time
What does a 1985 model look like in 2024?
Before we get to that, let’s start in 1985.
A Coca-Cola marketer tells his advertising agency that he wants to launch a new campaign in Ohio to increase in-store sales of New Coke. The agency outlines the goals to be achieved but makes no promises about results – and Coca-Cola's marketing people and management don't expect them to.
The agency puts up a New Coke billboard in Cincinnati and another version in Cleveland. The billboard that drives more sales in stores will go up nationwide.
In 2005, marketers and agencies changed history. They promised their bosses and clients to invest in digital marketing. Search engine optimization, pay-per-click, display advertising, retargeting, content marketing, etc. could now do what was once impossible – measuring the buyer's journey from start to finish.
In this new attribution model, they were able to quantify the value of each customer’s loyalty to the brand.
A shopper could see a pre-roll ad on YouTube, watch the video, then visit the brand's website to consume some of the content. Three months later, they signed up for the email newsletter. Then they saw an ad in the newsletter, clicked on it, and made their purchase.
Marketing has assigned a fractional value to each touchpoint based on the total sale. Now the company can accurately calculate the true value and impact of each marketing tactic.
Measuring Marketing in the Early 2020s
However, due to the events of the last five years, marketers and agencies can no longer fulfill the promises of an attribution model.
Third-party cookies are dying out. Apple has developed a private ecosystem. New regulations and laws in California, Canada, the European Union and parts of Europe have significantly limited marketers' ability to track the shopper.
And those aren't the only complications. Nearly a third of all internet users have ad blockers enabled, which block both tracking and advertising. Additionally, people are browsing in incognito mode and using multiple devices on their travels, making it even harder to track their activities.
Building a sophisticated attribution channel can still work for large-scale digital advertising, Rand says. But forget it if you want to attribute a journey that includes stops on Slack channels and social media platforms that get shoppers to watch a video or read an article before buying.
Modelling for 2024 and beyond
Instead, marketers should go back to the 1985 model. Rand and moderator Amanda Subler discussed this scenario: Someone sees an influencer mention a brand's product on Instagram. They later search for it on Google and buy it.
With the attribution model, Google would now get all the credit for the purchase because the brand didn't know the buyer had seen the influencer's video. Marketers relying on this false attribution would make poor decisions about whether to invest their budget in Google going forward.
Rand says when he looks at his favorite marketing campaigns and the things they did that influenced him to buy, none of the touchpoints map out.
Take the current “Visit Oslo” campaign: “Is it even a city?”
The ironic video was viewed 181,000 times in four days, garnered widespread media coverage and generated viral posts across the internet.
However, Visit Oslo will not be able to follow the journey of these viewers and readers over the next two years and attribute a portion of the increased flight and hotel sales to the video. However, Visit Oslo will see an increase in demand and the tourist office will consider the campaign to have been effective in increasing brand awareness.
“This is what almost all marketing investments will have to look like in the future,” says Rand.
To measure impact, follow in the footsteps of marketers in the 1980s. Evaluate the before-and-after metrics as a whole and don't assign a value to the contributions of each component.
Think about it: If Visit Oslo had stuck to an attribution model to determine the success of its quirky video, the company would likely have been disappointed with the results.
“Attribution destroys creativity. It destroys imagination. It destroys the things that are human and great,” Rand says.
Don’t give up on rankings completely
This modern measurement strategy is even more important in a zero-click marketing world, as platforms and people prefer one-stop content and marketers lose traffic to their own channels. “We're really trained as internet users not to click and stay on the platform,” Rand says.
Still, your brand can't ignore search rankings because they play a role in those zero-click results and some people still consider Google, other search engines, and even generative AI tools as their preferred research sources.
Rand explains how SparkToro overcame this challenge. The company creates a self-contained newsletter that requires no clicks. The 50,000+ recipients don't have to click on a link to learn more about a topic. But that also means Google can't recognize the value of that content and display it in search engine results. So SparkToro is thinking about how to use the newsletter content in a way that also attracts Google's attention.
“That’s the tension that exists in many of these systems,” Rand says.
But your measurements can help you determine how much tension there really is.
Rand reports on a recent presentation by Wil Reynolds, founder of Seer Interactive, who explained that organic traffic to his agency site dropped 41% in 18 months because Google changed its algorithm to favor zero-click results.
Such a decline sounds catastrophic, but Wil looked at other metrics and found that the number of new customer contacts and revenue had increased slightly over the same period.
TIP: The most valuable traffic from Google search for marketers is brand traffic – people who are searching for the brand (Adidas) rather than the product (running shoes).
What should a marketer do?
Every marketer needs to have a difficult conversation with their employer or client’s marketing, finance and executive teams about attribution modeling failure.
“They have to understand that by citing the source, they're missing out on almost every organic channel, every word-of-mouth channel, almost every organic social engagement channel, and almost every channel that doesn't directly provide a link that passes along a recommendation string,” Rand says.
Instead, they need to recognize that measurement is the preferred method and that it requires a long-term assessment of brand strength and awareness. “They're going to look at lift, not attribution,” Rand says. “They need to embrace this new way of doing things.”
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Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
