Attribution is a massive topic and crucial to measuring your business’s performance. There are a multitude of approaches you can take, and plenty of options available in existing technology.
Adobe has a number of attribution solutions, depending on your business goals. Not sure what’s the best fit for you? Take a look at the following business objectives, consider which match up to your current goals, and learn what Adobe’s Digital Marketing Cloud can deliver.
Optimising Paid Digital Advertising Channels
Say you’re in the early stages of your attribution maturity, or you’re responsible for one or more paid digital advertising channels. You’re looking for more visibility into the paid aspects of your customer journey – what the value of each of those touchpoints is and how you can deliver both a more consistent and personalised message cross-channel.
Because Adobe Media Optimizer optimises your Paid Search, Paid Social, & Display activity in one solution, it has the ability to provide you with assist reports from the channel level down to the keyword level, delivering visibility of your customers’ journeys within the context of those three paid channels. These insights can be actioned by applying one of five core attribution models – first click, last click, even distribution, weight first more, or weight last more. The business impact of running a particular model can be quantified leveraging Media Optimizer’s signature forecast simulations, so you are confident your choice is informed by your data. Additional analysis regarding attribution model selection and business impact is available via our Account Management teams, who are able run a number of bespoke pieces of analysis included as part of both tech-only and full service relationships.
If you are already working with another niche attribution technology, Adobe Media Optimizer can leverage data through partnering with these specialist technologies where requested by clients.
Understanding the Value of Multi-Channel Advertising in the Context of the Wider Business
If the concept of attribution has wider traction within your business, and you need to be able to demonstrate the value each channel is delivering within the context of the wider business to budget and strategise appropriately, Adobe Analytics provides a central hub of data so you can start comparing apples to apples. With its core tracking functionality, Adobe Analytics pulls all your online data, plus anonymised offline data that can be linked to a customer id (i.e. CRM data like gold member status, contract type, and contract end date). The reports and analysis available within Analytics Standard enable you to see a cross-channel campaigns view, getting to the bottom of what types of advertising are driving value and how the customer journey is shaped.
As Adobe Analytics plugs into all solutions with the Adobe Marketing Cloud, one of the additional benefits of utilising the marketing cloud from an attribution perspective is having all your activities and conversions across solutions flowing in and out of one single source of truth your business analysis can rely on. What value does that deliver? Well, besides consistency in reporting, which is a huge struggle for many businesses, you can do things like share that exact same segment with Adobe Target to further drive the customer journey towards conversion, tailoring the landing page with relevant products or an offer.
Full View on Channel Value + Actioning Custom Algorithmic Attribution Models
For those of you who are quite far along your attribution journey, and are looking for an enterprise solution to help you answer questions like how can we better understand the ROI of our paid and owned activities to report against our business’s core annual objectives or what additional profit margin can we generate by employing a custom attribution model and how can we create that, Adobe Analytics Premium including Data Workbench is the solution for you.
Not only does it provide full attribution capabilities across channels, it is also powered by sophisticated algorithms that enable you to employ a custom attribution model that is linked to your business’s unique data. This attribution model is then applied across all channels, both online and offline, including call centres, CRMs, direct mail, and so on.
When employed in conjunction with other solutions in the Marketing Cloud, not only do you have one central hub for your data processing and analysis, but you also have the ability to make more out of the data you already have – be it audience segments, customer attributes, assets, and more.
Combining the Value of Attribution and Audiences
Another sophisticated use of attribution analysis is combining who your customers are and how they are interacting with your brand with more advanced attribution methodologies seen above. This enables you to activate your segmentation data to bid for and buy ad space against more advanced logic.
Adobe Audience Manager – the DMP within Adobe’s Marketing Cloud – captures interactions a user has across media channels at an anonymised id level, so it gives a very clear picture of that user and their interaction with your brand. What you can then do is push segment data into an advanced analytics technology, like Adobe Analytics Premium (via native integration), or into a specialist attribution solution (via APIs or batch). This data can then be run against processes like propensity modelling to understand and score a segment’s likelihood to convert, for example, and then re-ingested into Audience Manager to help aid in segmentation and bidding strategies.
The power of using this within the context of the Adobe Marketing Cloud is these audience segments, whose value has been analysed in Adobe Analytics and then assigned within Audience Manager, can then be shared in Adobe Media Optimizer, where information like propensity scores can be leveraged to make smarter buying decisions across paid advertising channels – going above and beyond the optimisation Media Optimizer already provides. All this performance data is then fed back into Adobe Analytics, where further analysis, attribution, and reporting can be done within the wider business context. Effectively, your data and the value of your data comes full circle, driving results at a better margin against your overall business goals.
In attribution, as in all things digital advertising, and indeed, business – it all comes down to what your core business goal is and your current challenges in achieving that goal. Where you are in your business’s digital maturity will also play a role in what solution is most appropriate for you now, in a year, in three years. The important thing to keep in mind is not only what will help you solve your immediate issues, but also how what you are putting in place now can scale for the future maturity of your business.
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