User:Cellphone18/Last Click Attribution

Last Click Attribution is a marketing term referring to the difficulty associated with giving credit to the influence of multiple media touch-points within an integrated media mix. When a conversion is only a “click” away, it is virtually impossible to have a comprehensive customer map detailing what actually brought the customer to the point of conversion and how that customer navigated the sea of media leading up to that point.

In today’s digital landscape, there is much more to advertising than a pretty picture and a powerful call-to-action –- media is moving to a data-driven model. It can be said that data, analytics, measurement, tracking, targeting, metrics and more data are what fuel advertising campaigns at every level.

ONLINE

Search engines are great at measuring the last click, however, search engines are not responsible for generating the actual lead – the lead was generated elsewhere which, in turn, prompted the use of a search engine. Search engines do provide analytics regarding search results and allow companies to bid on keywords that would improve their search ranking. Google AdWords is one such pay-per-click advertising and analytics product. Though Google does a great job quantifying how many people search for a particular subject, it fails to take into consideration the media influence that leads up to that Google search. In this way, Google is getting the “last click.”

Imagine, for example, a customer sees an advertisement in a magazine and wants to learn more. Instead of typing in that company’s particular URL address, that customer chooses to use Google instead. Google records what content was searched while the magazine receives no credit for initiating the Google search. That magazine ad is victim to the last click attribution dilemma.

The technology behind affiliate marketing revolutionized the marketing industry by tracking the media exposure leading up to the final purchase. Affiliate marketing, essentially, is the method of using one website to drive traffic to another. By doing so, companies within an affiliate ad network can track traffic from website-to-website and, therefore, quantify leads generated on affiliate sites and award those sites with a portion of the revenue. This type of tracking is, so far, primarily available in the online world.

OFFLINE

Because online media is much easier to measure and includes more detailed metrics, media planners, in general, are shifting their media-spend to the digital realm. In this way, it appears that offline media is undervalued due to difficulties measuring its effectiveness. Advances in tracking technology and marketing techniques are quickly bridging the gap between online and offline advertising in hopes of improving measurement metrics and eradicating the last click attribution dilemma. Through the use of Personal URLs, or PURLs, marketers try to redirect consumers from an offline impression to a unique, online destination. PURLs are great in that they are extremely easy to measure, however, due to inherent difficulties people have remembering the PURL addresses (which are sometimes long and confusing with several backslashes, “/”) and entering it correctly in the URL search bar, their capabilities are limited. Furthermore, people often skip entering a PURL all together and find it easier to use a search engine instead. A television ad that ends with a call to action redirecting to a PURL address is an example of cross-media marketing (movement between television and internet). This is in recognizing that online search / browsing / purchasing behavior is influenced by offline media.

References

Google AdWords: No More Last-Click-Attribution Blues http://www.traffick.com/2010/03/google-adwords-no-more-last-click.asp

The Death of Last Click Attribution & Its Impact http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2009/08/the-death-of-last-click-attribution-its-impact/

Is Last-Click Attribution About To Become A Thing Of The Past? http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=69511

Media Attribution http://www.convertro.com/media-attribution.html

Atlas Study Critiques 'Last Click' Attribution http://www.clickz.com/3626112

Article compilation http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=IopWOO9Z3hGYXYAZfKAMnA

Offline Conversion Tracking: The missing metric http://searchengineland.com/offline-conversion-tracking-the-missing-metric-12467