Google Attribution: One Platform to Rule Them All and the War on Last-Click

June 01, 2017 14 Comments

Google announced some pretty serious ad tech innovation at the recent Marketing Next 2017 event. Chief among them is their new Google Attribution platform which purports to marry data across various channels to finally bring real clarity to the biggest marketing challenge / buzzword of the last few years: attribution.

While digital marketing has brought data to an industry generally plagued with cause and effect issues, in some cases it has brought more questions than answers: which marketing channel is really the best bang for my buck? How many channels do my customers tend to interact with, at what stages, and which are most influential? Where should we put our budget???

It may be wishful thinking to presume that Google Attribution will definitively answer these questions for all advertisers, but we hope it will be a big step in the right direction.

Google also specifically calls out Last Click attribution which we agree has been the industry standard for far too long.

Last Click is the default in Google Analytics and most analytics platforms, giving all credit to the last source, campaign, keyword, etc. that received an interaction just prior to conversion, which obviously ignores all the persuasion that came prior.

This results in entirely too much credit given to direct traffic, branded keywords, email and other aspects of marketing that tend to be the final destination in a searcher’s journey to conversion.

We’re excited to see the continued developments in this area.
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