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<aside> 📌 By Elliott Hasiuk. As we continue to move away from deterministic attribution to probabilistic and delayed attribution, prepare for the loss of third-party cookies, and undergo increased privacy constraints, we must continue to adopt a test-and-learn mindset. The following article outlines a few approaches and experiments Part and Sum is taking in order to continuously drive the outcomes we want for our clients.
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Let’s take a look at new measures taken in the advertising landscape over the past year. Apple’s 2021 App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy update continues to upend the ad industry, including the phasing out of unique user identifiers for advertisers, hiding Apple users’ IP addresses, and introducing private email relay to further obscure email data. Apple’s move significantly undercut Facebook’s ad capabilities, who in turn introduced aggregated events measurement (AEM) to make up for lost performance and measurement (more about this here: Where do things stand with attribution? ). On top of it all, GDPR has continued to be enforced in the EU with mixed results.
This year, we can look forward to:
It’s a lot. The following are 5 approaches we’re taking to continuously drive the outcomes we need as these changes take effect over the next year.
Gone are the days when marketers could rely exclusively on 1-to-1, real-time campaign reporting at the browser level. We have embraced the use of advanced matching and server-level API tracking across channels to ensure that we minimize signal loss and maximize data-driven optimization. This way, we can fuel conversion modeling by enhancing the size and quality of custom and lookalike audiences.
Now that it’s increasingly difficult to drive top of funnel direct response conversions, we’re focused on building re-targetable on-platform engagements to help educate and qualify users. With the right sequential messaging, we can add more retargeting touch-points across channels, and then re-engage those users via programmatic marketing efforts. Right now, we’re seeing a lot of innovation in the out-of-home space that incorporates more user data into their targeting efforts.
As in-platform return on ad spend (ROAS) becomes less reliable, we are increasingly focused on marketing efficiency (MER), blended cost per acquisition (CAC), geo-lift, conversion lift, brand lift studies and A/B tests to help understand the holistic impact of marketing investments. Customer data platforms like Segment and the use of offline conversion measurement help us capture and act on more user data while we prompt users early and often to opt-in to owned channels. This allows us to close the loop from first interaction to last-touch conversion and optimize for leads that convert, not just the leads that were the cheapest to acquire.
Alongside our focus on campaign manager tags to holistically track reach, frequency, engagements and conversion attribution, deep-linking tools like Branch and Adjust also help us track users from ad click to app registration and install. We’ve employed detailed UTMs to help inform last-click attribution at the channel, campaign, audience, creative and placement level. We’re monitoring assisted conversions and leveraging post-conversion surveys (from Enquire Labs). We’re also testing new attribution tools like Triple Whale so that we can better understand how users first encounter our clients, the number of touch points a user needs, how long it takes them to convert, and which touchpoint encouraged users to complete a transaction.