Rethinking Attribution Challenges In Digital Marketing

It’s pretty standard these days for a brand to utilise multiple digital agencies – a PPC agency alongside a Social Media agency, alongside an SEO agency. And it’s easy to see why. After all, why would you settle for compromise when you can have a specialist in each field working for you? 

But it throws up a question – when all the specialists are focused on their individual areas, who is looking at the bigger picture? As long as their monthly report shows a healthy ROAS or a broad increase in page rankings for example, why would each individual specialist necessarily notice if the brand’s bottom line had stagnated and failed to grow last year? 

What we’re increasingly seeing in our client briefs, is the digital sector sometimes missing the mark in articulating and understanding the complex intricacies of sales attribution, and how they impact their client’s overall marketing strategies. 

Choosing and investing in the wrong strategy can cost a business. We often come across strategies that see the majority of budget focused on brand bidding in Paid Search and typical re-targeting campaigns across Social Media and Display. Whilst this usually shows healthy ROAS figures, what you’re really doing is going after the same pool of potential customers who are already brand aware. This will ultimately result in growth slowing, and eventually flatlining completely. 

It’s common knowledge that there is no ‘one size fits all’ path to conversion in the digital landscape, the modern elements of marketing don’t work independently, they work in unison. In a recent white paper, Deloitte discovered that over 60% of orders come off the back of a customer having been nudged down the sales funnel, having ‘touched’ multiple channels on their way there. As such, digital marketing strategies overall, need to analyse and optimise the part that all channels play collectively. 

The problem is, measuring attribution accurately is costly, technically advanced, and sometimes even questionable, if done as scientifically as the tools will allow. Due to the source data you are having to use, you are entirely in their hands as to the accuracy of what is provided. It leaves a lingering question mark in the background – you simply must trust the likes of Facebook and Google – you have no choice.

Facing these challenges, we created Digital Intelligence. It deploys a process to holistically analyse a brand’s performance from the top down. This doesn’t just include the regular digital channel audit, but a forensic interrogation of the brands operations, trading history, competitor set, positioning, customer behaviour and profitability. 

Ultimately, we want to emerge from the process not only with the insights that empower the brand to make the right decisions, but with a set of clear and tangible strategic recommendations that dovetails a long-term brand strategy with short term digital execution to ensure that the business will embark on a sustainable growth journey.

For more information, get in touch james@propaganda.co.uk today.