When the economy is slow, marketing euros are hard to come by. But at the same time, in these times you the marketer need to work even harder to get more people to start buying stuff, so you need to keep engaging in ever more effective marketing activities. How does one balance out these two forces? The solution is to make sure that you optimally allocate your marketing spend in places which produce the impact and brings the best results. This is where data-driven digital attribution and our Digital Sales Optimization (DSO) comes to the rescue. Read on to know more!
Digital attribution
If you already know what attribution is, then feel free to jump directly to the next paragraph! If not, then here’s what I am talking about. When one of your customers “converts”-defined as how you want it, such as visiting your website, buying something, donating, visiting a store etc… this path to conversion is driven by the marketing actions they have been exposed to across various channels, media and messages. The way in which you give credit aka attribute credit to each channel or messages is attribution. A subset of this is how to attribute the performance of digital channels, i.e. digital attribution.
Attribution is not an easy task. There is a scarcity of data and some data which are simply non-existent. And no matter how much we would want to, we cannot obviously follow people around and observe their actions on their path to conversion. In the post-cookie, GDPR world, we must take consumer privacy very seriously!
Bad attribution – because that’s how we have always done it
To come up with how to decide on attribution, people have gotten into the habit of making up various arbitrary rules-heuristic rules–which have stuck around even though they don’t make too much sense. These include e.g. last-click, first-click, position-based attribution. For example, last-click gives ALL the credit to the last (final) interaction prior to conversion and first-click on the other hand gives ALL the credit to the first interaction in the path to conversion. Clearly, this is not a good way to apportion credit since every single one of the so-called touchpoints contribute to the conversion and thus should get a portion of credit (attribution) to the conversion. And yet, a majority continue using these simply because it is the quick and easy way to do it and “this is the way we have always done it”. In fact, by doing this, studies have shown that you are losing out on a lot of opportunity and end up not putting your marketing spend in the right places! The best approach is to use the masses of actual data that we have access to and do data-driven digital attribution. I don’t know about you, but I think that making decisions based on actual data is better than using arbitrary rules.
Good attribution – data driven and algorithmic
The good news is, we are now in the age of Generative AI and machine learning and have plentiful computing–power, so you don’t have to be stuck in the stone-age of digital attribution. You can use data-driven digital attribution to optimally allocate your spend!
Digital Sales Optimization (DSO)
We at OMD Finland and Omnicom with our local and global resources and years of expertise have developed a data-driven, cookie-less digital attribution solution “Digital Sales Optimization (DSO)” which gives you fine-grained understanding of the impact of your digital marketing spend while protecting customer privacy in a GDPR compliant manner. DSO is inspired by Meta’s Robyn open-source project and utilizes Bayesian methodologies.
One of the big issues with attribution is the inability to follow marketing messaging/marketing campaigns across unrelated marketing channels. With Omnicoms campaign campaign-tagging solution, we are able to follow campaign performance and spend across marketing channels with ease.
Another advantage of DSO is that unlike in the past, the models can be updated in almost real-time (daily, weekly etc..) and one can follow the performance of your digital channels on the DSO dashboard that we offer and respond quickly as needed depending on your needs and goals. In addition, OMD’s expertise coupled with Omnicom’s multi-faceted OMNI platform which can help you plan your campaign spend allocation among other things, and now ALSO includes the latest OMNI-Assist Large-Language-Model (LLM) based Generative AI solution.
And if you want to go all in and do a more in-depth look at the performance of your marketing and advertising efforts online, offline and macro-trends, external factors such as weather etc.. then you can combine DSO with Marketing Mix Modelling and Scenario Tools.
