Making Attribution Deterministic

Attribute Marketing Spend to Real Consumers and Connect Consumer Behavior

The current understanding of attribution is often defined by last-click, view through, full-funnel, fractional lift, and other convenient measures. In truth, these measuring sticks are anything but deterministic. At best, they’re misleading.

To understand the value of your advertising investment, the attribution method applied should be dealing with all the actual touch points of consumers who eventually transact. You need to make your attribution deterministic.

Consumer behavior is complex. Over a months-long campaign, a consumer will be influenced in some way by a series of interactions across a variety of platforms and touch points. This is especially true of multi-channel campaigns that involve digital, television, direct mail, and other tactics.

Knowing which consumer engaged with what tactic is what most marketers want to know. If marketers could tie a unique user to a website visit, a digital ad impression, a direct mail delivery, and a keyword search, the problem would be solved. The problem is that traditional attribution methods don't have the capability to transcend these different touch points.

Semcasting has developed a Unique ID capable of mapping the consumer across many of the marketing touch points in the sales funnel.

Our toolkit includes a website attribution process known as Site Visitor Attribution (SVA). By placing an SVA tag on a website, metrics can be collected to link a site visitor to an onboarded audience, the ad-server impression, the page they visited, their precise location, device type, and their consumer profile. Today, this can be extended to direct mail, programmatic TV, and radio.

With SVA, the consumer profile can be mapped back to an original onboarded audience in a manner that is de-identified for privacy, but still persistent to the consumer journey through the sales funnel.

To learn more about making attribution deterministic, download our SVA overview.