Attribution ≠ Multi-touch attribution (MTA). Barbara Galiza thinks that MTA is really only good at measuring search marketing and that's it. Because MTA only works if there's a click and within a short window there's also a conversion.
MTA even in its most advanced and rigorous formulations (using Markov Chains or Shapley values) is really just a way of showing varying degrees of correlations between marketing actions and specified outcomes. From the outset, it’s a a misnomer as to attribute implies some causality that isn’t truly provable within the MTA framework. There are alternative methods like incrementality/MMM modeling that are explicitly for that. That said, not causal doesn’t mean not useful. Even in the hard sciences where RCTs are a gold standard for causal determination, there are other types of study designs which serve other purposes and that still provide valuable information about a phenomenon being studied. I think MTAs having really emerged in the pre “death of cookies” era were tightly related to Marketers attempts to “track” consumer behavior (digital behavior at least) through a kind of predefined customer journey. When seen through that lense, I can understand why they became as ubiquitous as they did. I can also understand why with that kind of mass adoption, there was inevitable misuse and misunderstanding of methodology
Phil Gamache. MTA is just 1 component of the bigger picture. it is no longer the end goal. It's just a fancy version of last touch across a customer journey model. At the end of the day it's just advanced last touch. MTA now is just part of the overall picture, not the end all be all of reporting. Including MTA into a bigger reporting strategy is the future.
2025, the year of the “in-session obsession” 😂
MTA is great at measuring many channels other than just search marketing. One example is events. Events and MTA work really well together because events always have a mix of people we just met through the event, and people that we've known for a while. The ability for MTA to factor event attendance into the buying journey, whether it's the first interaction, or the 75th interaction, is a perfect fit for that specific channel.