Google attribution, the new holy grail for digital marketing?

05th Jun 2017 Posted By Faheem Ahmed

Google announced the launch of Google Attribution at the Google Marketing Next conference held in San Francisco recently. Google attribution is a revised version of a multichannel attribution service called Adometry which Google acquired in 2014. This is big news for the digital marketing industry as Google Attribution claims to fill the gaps in monitoring the influence of their digital marketing ventures on sales and vice versa.

The current scenario of digital marketing

There are many attribution models out there, but, none provides a holistic experience to the marketers who rely on data for insights. Attribution enables marketers understand the conversion of prospects to clients. Most models give credit to the first or last touchpoints in the conversion ignoring the path connecting the beginning to the end, which makes it difficult for advertisers to measure the return on investment with precision. As customers come in contact with a number of touchpoints before they make the actual purchase, attributing credit for sales to the last click will not generate accurate results for the marketer. There are various channels accessible through various devices and monitoring conversion paths with the existing attribution models is not easy.

How is Google Attribution going to make a difference?

This is where Google steps in with Google Attribution which closely monitors the various touchpoints in a customer’s path to purchase. It makes it easier for the marketer to know what influences the customer and where to invest for better results. It helps in understanding consumer behaviour to specifically display targeted advertisements and ultimately promote sales.

Why is this update important for digital marketing?

Google integrates attribution data with Google Analytics, Google AdWords and DoubleClick Search. It does not require any additional tagging. Google Attribution uses machine learning to deliver accurate results to forecast outcomes. The machine learning tool assigns due credit to the touchpoints along the customers’ purchase path. This data-driven attribution model could provide beneficial information for optimum use of various channels and allocation of resources. The information derived can also be used to determine the future scale of operations.

Google has also taken steps to measure journeys that begin online and end offline. Tracking this is made possible as brick-and-mortar purchases can be measured by uploading in-store transactions to the system which is integrated with Google Attribution and also by using third party partnerships which record 70% of credit card and debit card sales information in the United States. Like in the US, in India, digital marketers can combine online and offline sales data to measure the efficacy of the digital marketing campaigns. Marketers will be able to plan the budget and spend wisely to make sure that their investment improves ROI, be it in the form of digital branding, leads, sales, etc.

In simple words, Google Attribution unifies data from integration with other features, analyzes performance and automatically sends the results back for optimization. Though it is not a pioneer, Google’s efforts to measure the effects of marketing are expected to pull the last-click attribution model to the curb. Facebook events API is helping solve this problem & very soon we can expect Google to make it easier for us digital marketers to address the last-click attribution challenge

Google Attribution is now in beta and will be made available to more digital marketers in the next few months. Best of all, this Google product can be used for free. At BYT we are working with Google & Facebook to implement such advanced attribution for our clients giving them the clarity to invest confidently in digital marketing to improve their business. What has your experience been with Facebook offline event? Are you as excited about the roll out of Google attribution as we are?