Thread by @BinetLes

Why are Meta & Google moving away from digital attribution as a way of measuring marketing effectiveness?
Data issues are part of the story, but it’s bigger than that. This Google report gives some insight into their thinking. 1/9
thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/fut…
#marketing
#advertising

The big problem is that digital attribution models struggle to measure “incrementality”. If 1m people see your ad, and 1k buy your product, how many sales are genuinely incremental? The answer might be anywhere between 0 and 1k. Attribution models on their own can’t tell. 2/9

As Google pointed out over 5 years ago, controlled experiments and rigorous econometrics are much better for measuring incrementality. And those techniques reveal that digital attribution models are often WILDLY inaccurate. 3/9

New analysis from Facebook confirms what many econometricians have been saying for years: attribution models overestimate the relative effectiveness of direct response channels, and underestimate the effect of brand building media. 4/9

Digital attribution models are poor at measuring offline media, for obvious reasons. This matters A LOT. Meta’s own econometrics shows that TV is still the medium generating the most incremental sales. Yet attribution models struggle to measure the effects of media like TV. 5/9

Another reason why digital attribution gets ROI wrong is that it’s short term. Meta’s new research confirms that ad effects can last for months or years, and most of the payback comes from these long-term effects. Attribution models rarely look beyond a few days or weeks. 6/9

Google’s report identifies short-termism & the failure to measure incrementality as challenges that must be solved if we are to measure effectiveness properly. Google suggest a way forward: supplement digital attribution with experiments & econometrics to “triangulate” ROI. 7/9

And that’s the direction that both Google and Meta have been moving in for several years now. It’s just taken a while for everyone else to catch up. 8/9

Matt Taylor, lead author of the Google paper is a smart cookie. Here he is at the IPA’s 2017 Eff Week conference, talking about some of these issues. 9/9