The beauty of online campaigns is that everything can be measured from reach and clicks to conversions. However, gaining insight into the customer journey across different online media remains a challenge. But change is on the way. We were recently updated by Facebook on the possibilities of using their attribution tool to combine data from different systems.
Single source of truth
Measuring the results of cross-channel campaigns is often impossible. Due to the use of different systems and platforms such as Facebook, Google, premium channels or programmatic, it is difficult to combine data to arrive at unambiguous and actionable insights. As a result, important questions such as "How many contacts were needed to achieve a conversion?" and "Which resources played a role in the customer journey?" often remain unanswered. As a result, you do not know to what extent resources contribute to a conversion and that makes it almost impossible to optimally invest your budget in the best performing channels. With the proper use of an attribution tool, this seems closer than ever.
What is the impact of this?
The most important question is what impact different media have on conversions. However, understanding this customer journey is limited in several ways, making answering this question difficult. First of all, no single system tells the whole story because data from different platforms cannot be combined. In Facebook, you only measure the effect of Facebook. In Google Analytics, you do see the results of all your online media efforts, but those are only results that come from a click. You then have no insight into all the contacts that were required to do so. Although they may have played a role in the purchase process.
So you have no insight into how many people saw your ads but never clicked and still bought your product. It is not unlikely that they were influenced just by seeing the ad. Since conversions are usually attributed to the channel that achieved the last click, this does not provide a picture of the impact of the mid/lower funnel. This traditional way of measuring misses 40% of contacts and therefore the picture of a campaign's impact on conversions is limited.
There are already systems in which both post-view and post-click conversions can be insightful, but then it is only about paid media engagement. This is generally not cross-device and in this the impressions from Facebook are missing, because Facebook does not share data with other measurement systems.
The solution
An attribution tool combines impression, click and conversion data from different systems. This allows you to provide cross-channel and cross-device insight into all media contacts (touch points) of the customer journey. Instead of assigning all the value of a conversion only to the last interaction before purchase, attribution allows you to assign value to all touch points.
This attribution of the value that touch points contribute to a conversion can be done in several ways. First, you can choose even attribution where all touch points are assigned equal value. A second option is time dependent where touch points closer to conversion are assigned more value than touch points at the beginning of the customer journey.
Several parties already offer such tools. But now that tech giant Facebook has developed its own (free) tool for this purpose, usage becomes more accessible. In fact, Facebook already owns 50% of the campaign data, as Facebook and Instagram are used in almost every campaign. This is data they never wanted to share with outside parties and now they want to combine all the data to form a single source of truth. Of course, the question then becomes to what extent other parties are willing to share their data with Facebook.
Another advantage is that Facebook attribution can track conversions within a 90-day time frame, while separate ad management systems maintain a maximum time of 28 days.
Why is an attribution tool useful?
The moment you have insight into the extent to which different media contribute to conversions, you can use this information to allocate budget as efficiently as possible and run more effective campaigns, so you can ultimately achieve more results with the same budget. At Stroom , we are happy to help with this.