The other day I was thinking about attribution. Most folks these days agree that last-click attribution isn’t the best practice, but we’re still struggling to make sense of it. How do we make sure that the proper pieces of the marketing mix receive credit?
I stared to wonder if detailed planning could help solve the problem. If you’re using online display ads to drive traffic to your website, you can use something like Google Analytics to track how different ads are driving traffic. If you use some paid tools, you can even see traffic on a placement level.
But maybe you’re running TV commercials at the same time and you want to capture traffic from those ads, too. Maybe you give a specific URL in the commercial. But that tells you how much traffic comes from all TV. What if all of it is really coming from one spot on one channel? Can you really give different URLs on each spot to give proper attribution?
I know I’m thinking about this too much, and I’m thinking too small. But I can’t help it. How granular do you go? How many layers do you add before the additional value is no longer worth the effort?
