⏳ 2014: On stage at an Easy Weddings event I told an audience of skeptical Australian wedding professionals that Google Analytics conversion tracking meant they could track every conversion back to the referrer. Simple. Marketing works! ⌛ 2023: At a DTCX event in Austin I am asked in front of an audience of DTC marketers for my thoughts on attribution, and if I had a preferred platform. My response was "attribution and all the attribution programs are RUBBISH" (sorry American friends... "trash") In this day and age, there's too many variables, online, offline... AND too many barriers (see below), to make any of it more than guesswork. So I'm all in on SparkToro's advice of 🎉 Measurement over Attribution 🎉 Of course you need to understand which channels are working, which are not, which work well in tandem and at different points of the buyers journey and to different objectives, where are your customers spending time, etc etc That's marketing! The era of "take this pill for all your attribution woes" is over. H/t Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad #attribution #marketing
Don't forget Google 'data driven' hiding conversions. Which is about as an accurate description as 'smart campaigns'.
Yuuup! In ~2014 we were all about attribution! Thank you for sharing, Russ.
I don't think multi-touch digital attribution was ever an effective tool. Basically just a redistribution of a (tracked only) value in a closed ecosystem. No acknowledgement of impact outside tracking ecosystem, no acknowledgement of significant non-tracked media investment support, no consideration of incrementality. That's why we've adopted a regression based approach to digital attribution.
I see (and try to stop) so many bad decisions based on last touch attribution reporting. It’s also genuinely a full circle moment for me to see us returning to so many of the marketing practices and principles we adopted in the pre-digital days. And I am 100% here for it.
You were ahead of times brother. Just like with Stuff Sales People Say
image lifted from Amanda Natividad's newsletter and here: https://sparktoro.com/blog/attribution-is-dying-clicks-are-dying-marketing-is-going-back-to-the-20th-century/