Closed-Loop Attribution and the Customer ID

As Multi-Channel Strategies Increase, Marketers Need to Close the Loop

A recent IAB report found that the majority of marketers, media buyers, publishers, and digital advertising technology executives felt that cross-channel measurement and closed-loop attribution will be the most important industry focus in 2017.

In practical terms: as digital investment increases, marketers will demand to know which of their programs are working.

For all the effort put into solving cross-platform campaign attribution, connections between website sessions, audiences, store purchases, and match rates remain painfully thin. Cookie blocking grows every year, one-to-one audiences live mostly behind walled gardens, and device extension is probabilistic when applied at scale.

As a result, existing closed-loop attribution programs are often based on a small sample of each audience file that is modeled to forecast a final purchase decision. For anything less than a national consumer brand, it is a challenge to reach a statistically accurate conclusion.

The deterministic way to view the customer’s path to purchase is to develop a campaign around a singular, persistent base: the IP.

Unlike cookies or other channel-specific IDs, an audience developed and targeted around IP addresses will remain transparent across platforms, devices, and locations. Served impressions can be matched against the original audience; website visits can be linked to specific profiles or devices; and purchase events can be associated with marketing impressions, devices, and points of purchase — no matter when they occur.

Semcasting developed Smart Zones to fill the unique user reach and scale requirements of cross-device and cross-channel marketing. Our twice-patented technology maps the IP delivery points of offline locations to devices, households, and businesses. In this way, audiences can be built online using deterministic data and then mapped to their ISP delivery points for digital advertising — and then connected to website visits, CRM postal registrations, and offline in-store transactions.

Learn more about how Semcasting Smart Zones® and Site Visitor Attribution can close the loop for your multi-channel marketing campaigns.