If marketers want their brands to be successful in 2024 and beyond, they should stop using attribution models and go back to measurement models like 1985.
“Attribution is completely broken these days, but we still use it the same way we used to,” said Rand FishkinCo-founder of SparkToro.
He recently shared this information while visiting CMI Live to watch the episode Can we really still “measure” marketing?
Read on (or watch the video) to hear Rand’s take on how marketers got here and how they can move to more meaningful metrics in 2024.
return to the past
What will the 1985 model look like in 2024?
Before that, let’s start with 1985.
A Coca-Cola marketer told his advertising agency that they wanted to launch a new campaign in Ohio to drive same-store sales of New Coke. The agency outlined deliverables but made no commitments to results—nor did Coca-Cola’s marketers and top management expect them to.
The agency installed a new Coca-Cola billboard in Cincinnati and a different version of the billboard in Cleveland. Whichever increases same-store sales more, both will be implemented statewide.
By 2005, marketers and agencies had changed that. They promise to get their bosses and clients to invest in digital marketing. Search engine optimization, pay-per-click, display advertising, retargeting, content marketing and more now make it possible to achieve what was once impossible – measuring the buyer’s journey from start to finish.
In this new attribution model, they can quantify the value of each customer’s interaction with the brand.
Buyers can see a YouTube pre-roll ad, watch the video, and then visit the brand’s website to consume a piece of content. Three months later, they signed up for an email newsletter. Then they see an ad in the newsletter, click on it and make a purchase.
The marketing department assigns a score value to each touchpoint based on total sales. Now, the company can accurately calculate the true value and impact of each marketing strategy.
Measuring Marketing in the Early 2020s
However, events over the past five years or so mean marketers and agencies can no longer deliver on the promise of attribution models.
Third-party cookies are dying. Apple has further developed its private ecosystem. New regulations and laws in California, Canada, the European Union and parts of Europe have reduced marketers’ ability to track buyers.
These are not the only complications. almost One-third of Internet users have ad blockers enabled. It blocks tracking and advertising. Additionally, people use private browsing and multiple devices while traveling, making it harder to track their activities.
Rand said building sophisticated attribution pipelines may still work for digital advertising at scale. But if you want to attribute a journey that includes stops on Slack channels and social media platforms leading buyers to watch videos or read articles before buying, forget it.
Modeling for 2024 and beyond
Instead, marketers should go back to 1985. Rand and host Amanda Subler discussed this scenario: An influencer is seen mentioning a brand’s products on Instagram. Later, they searched for it on Google and purchased it.
Now, under the attribution model, Google will receive all credit for the purchase because the brand has no idea that the buyer watched the influencer video. Marketers who rely on this misattribution will make poor decisions about investing their budget in Google in the future.
Rand said that when he looked at his favorite campaigns and what they convinced him to buy, not a single touchpoint was attributable.
Just take the nearest one Visit Oslo activities ——Is this still a city?
tongue-in-cheek tone vIDeo It racked up 181,000 views in four days, garnered major media coverage and generated a viral post across the internet.
But Oslo Tourism was unable to track the journeys of these viewers and readers over the next two years and attributed a percentage of the growth in flight and hotel sales to the film. However, demand for visits to Oslo will increase and the tourism board will see the event as Build brand awareness.
“That’s the way almost all marketing investments are going to have to be in the future,” Rand said.
To measure impact, you should follow in the footsteps of the marketers of the 1980s. Evaluate the before and after metrics holistically, rather than assigning a value to each component’s contribution.
Think about it. If Visit Oslo insists on using attribution models to determine the success of its quirky films, the results may be disappointing.
“Attribution destroys creativity. It destroys imagination. It destroys humanity and awesomeness,” Rand said.
Don’t give up on rankings entirely
This modern measurement strategy is zero click In the marketing world, both platforms and humans prefer one-stop content, while marketers lose traffic from their own channels. “As Internet users, we’ve really been trained not to click and to stay on the platform,” Rand said.
Still, your brand can’t ignore search rankings because they play a role in zero-click results, and some people still consider Google, other search engines, and even generated artificial intelligence tools as their go-to research sources.
Rand describes how SparkToro met this challenge. It creates a standalone or zero-click newsletter. More than 50,000 recipients can read more about a topic without clicking a link. However, this also means that Google cannot see and recognize the value of this content and display it in search engine results. So SparkToro thought about how to use newsletter content in a way that would also catch Google’s attention.
“That’s the tension that exists in a lot of these systems,” Rand said.
But your metrics can help you understand how stressed you really are.
Rand recounts a recent incident Will Reynolds’ speechThe founder of Seer Interactive, he said that organic traffic to his agency’s website dropped 41% in 18 months as Google changed its algorithm and supported zero-click results.
Such a drop sounds disastrous, but Weir looked at other metrics and found that new customer leads and revenue were up slightly over the same period.
hint: For marketers, the most valuable traffic in Google searches is brand traffic—people searching for the brand (Adidas) rather than the product (running shoes).
What is a marketer to do?
Every marketer must have difficult conversations with their employer or client’s marketing, finance, and executive leadership teams about attribution model failures.
“They have to understand that when you provide attribution, you’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 drive links through referrals, ” Rand said.
Instead, they must recognize that measurement is the preferred approach and that long-term assessment of brand strength and awareness is required. “You focus on improvement, not attribution,” Rand said. “They have to embrace this new way of operating.”
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
