The New Rules of Digital Marketing Attribution

Digital marketing moves fast, and the rules are constantly changing. Consumer shopping habits are shifting, and what worked yesterday is never guaranteed to work tomorrow.

You know this, but have you considered how digital marketing analytics is changing?

The data behind your brand’s marketing efforts helps you make decisions and determine a campaign’s success or failure. It’s arguably just as important as your creative assets and other pieces of the marketing puzzle.

But far too many brands are stuck in the past, relying on outdated attribution models and fragmented reporting tools to gauge a channel’s success or failure, and making costly mistakes along the way.

It’s time to understand the new rules of digital marketing attribution, recalibrate your thinking about measuring channel success, and consider how following these rules can set your brand up for digital success now and in the future.

Third-party data has served digital marketers well for years, but it’s time to say goodbye.

Most internet browsers already deprecate third-party cookies by default, and although Google has chosen to keep them in Chrome (for now), there’s no guarantee they’ll remain available forever.

The first-party era is here, and the sooner you start collecting and leveraging your first-party data, the sooner you can improve your marketing attribution data analysis accuracy.

First-party data essentially future-proofs your marketing strategy and is helpful in attribution analysis, providing a more accurate picture of your customers’ shopping journeys.

With this privacy-friendly data, you can connect the dots between a social media interaction and a final purchase (so long as your reporting tool is unified).

At the end of the day, attribution is about assigning credit where it's due, so you can better understand the performance of each individual channel. First-party data is key to this mission.

No more guessing: It’s time to leverage real, accurate user data in your decision-making process.

Your brand isn’t on just one platform, and your campaigns don’t run through just one channel.

Omni-channel marketing is the best way to compete online, and is a core part of our approach at VELOX.

However, to launch a successful omni-channel marketing strategy, your data and attribution models must be unified in one platform.

If your paid media data lives in one place, your social media data in another, and e-commerce sales data in yet another platform, it will be challenging to spot trends and get a full-funnel picture of your marketing efforts.

Where are people discovering your brand?

How does each channel contribute to conversions overall?

Which channels deliver the best ROI?

By eliminating data silos, you can answer all of these questions and accurately connect channel results to revenue growth, streamlining your marketing efforts across every channel.

Consumer trends change quickly, so having the most up-to-date data is valuable.

It enables your brand to make smarter, faster decisions, so you can capitalize on growing momentum or pivot your strategy if ROI starts to dip.

The truth is, you don’t always have the luxury of waiting weeks for post-campaign analysis, as you could miss valuable opportunities in the moment while the campaign is still running.

By leveraging first-party data and using a unified multi-channel data platform, you can gather real-time insights that empower your brand to make mid-campaign adjustments or identify opportunities that actually move the needle as they’re happening.

These are just a few ways to leverage real-time attribution data.

With access to these insights, you can supercharge your campaigns, reduce wasted spend, and create new revenue opportunities.

Even with the best reporting tools and the purest attribution models, you can only analyze so much. You’re great at spotting patterns, but that shouldn’t keep you from using every tool available.

More and more marketers are integrating AI into their reporting and attribution data analysis, and it’s already built into many advanced analytics tools.

AI can help you stay on top of your campaign’s performance, your spend, and provide vital alerts so you never miss an emerging opportunity.

The key lies in AI’s ability to analyze vast data sets from various platforms. AI can help you connect the dots from one platform to the next, providing a clearer view of your entire funnel and helping you understand how each campaign impacts another.

This is especially useful when unique identifiers aren’t available, providing fairly accurate predictions in its attribution modeling that you might have otherwise missed.

Additionally, AI is powerful in picking up on subtle trends, like recognizing how one seemingly low-performing channel actually drives top-of-funnel awareness that contributes to conversions. Rather than pulling the plug, it might be worth investing further in this campaign, since it contributes significantly at the start of the buyer journey.

There are separate AI tools built for attribution analysis, all with varying features and reliability in real-world use cases.

The best option is to choose a reporting platform with built-in AI analysis and other capabilities. This keeps all of your data in one place, streamlines the entire process, and reduces the chance of misinterpretation or fragmentation.

Your attribution analysis is only as powerful as the reporting tool you use.

Too many marketers are constantly bouncing from one tab to the next, trying to compare their attribution data across platforms.

This fragmentation is frustrating at best, but is costly at worst. It could limit your ability to make smart, quick decisions, and you could be leaving revenue on the table since you can’t spot the patterns between channels.

A unified marketing attribution tool is the key to competing now and in the future.

This is the ultimate way to gain a full-funnel view of your customers, so you can see what drives awareness, what encourages users to consider your products, and what ultimately triggers a conversion.

Pivot Faster: Campaigns move quickly, so you need real-time insights into your performance. Unified attribution data reporting allows you to adjust your campaign mid-flight, maximizing your ROI without waiting weeks for post-campaign data to roll in.

Make Smarter Budget Decisions: You need to maximize every marketing dollar across various platforms. Unified attribution data can help you spot patterns as they emerge and shift your spend to the channels and campaigns driving the highest ROI while limiting budget waste on underperforming channels.

Optimize Creatives: Creatives play a crucial role in paid media success, whether on social media or on search engines. Unified attribution can help you identify the top-performing creatives, so you can make smarter budgeting decisions.

Full-Funnel Visibility: Eliminate data silos and see your customer journey from start to finish across every platform. This provides a more accurate assessment of channel performance and can help you plan for predictable success.

Data is at the heart of everything we do at VELOX. With real-time insights and cross-channel analysis, we enable our clients to grow their businesses, improving ROI across the board while minimizing budget waste.

Whether your brand is trying to achieve its first top 5 Organic Search rankings or you need help managing multi-million dollar paid media campaigns, we’re here to help. With our revolutionary New Revenue Modeling tool, we can accurately forecast revenue contribution across channels, so you can see the direct impact of your investment.

Want to learn more about our data-driven approach, along with our new attribution reporting tools? Contact us today.