The Tricky Tales Of Political Attribution

The post-mortems of the 2014 election cycle are well underway. At this point, we can safely declare that the use of data mining, social media and email are now standard campaign methods. The use of mobile devices to get out the vote is also an acknowledged advancement that both parties seem to have used successfully — at least to some extent in 2014.

So what’s next?

Undoubtedly, the technology of mobile targeting will improve with advances in geo-fencing and improved location capabilities. There will be a continuation of activity to embrace nascent Internet TV, or over-the-top (OTT) services from Dish, Direct-TV, Verizon, Sony and others. There will be questions of scale and voter reach for the near future but eventually OTT will have an impact — but probably not soon enough for 2016.

For 2016 and beyond the metrics of success for political marketing technology may include a shift by campaigns to address a subtle, but more important, question:

“Who am I reaching?”

For all the sign-ups, likes and links, questions that have yet to be answered effectively include: How can I validate that my social followers are the right followers? Is my display advertising being seen by the right audience and are my key word buys attracting the right voters? Beyond sign-ups, answering the simple question, “Who is visiting my campaign website?,” could be the next game-changer for political marketing.

I say “simple” because despite all the tools and technology available in politics today, clear answers can sometimes be hard to come by. In the 2014 cycle, the “who” question was already being asked. We ran hundreds of ad campaigns for candidates and advocacy groups, and it wasn’t uncommon to get a request for confirmation as to who was visiting their sites and who was viewing their ads. Campaign managers are doing the right thing — they need to know that their dollars are being spent effectively.

Google Analytics nips around the edges of this problem by providing counts, trends and referral information of what remains a largely anonymous and untraceable audience. The other approach being used to address this issue is retargeting. While retargeting occurs based on a site visit, it does nothing to tell you who has visited your site or who has seen, but not clicked on, an ad.

Addressing these questions will push future campaigns to consider the issues of view ability and attribution. These issues are already acknowledged in ad tech today. The industry recognizes that advertisers want better validation of the efficacy of the ad dollars being spent online. Fixing the problem is an obvious economic priority.

Today there are high-end viewability and attribution solutions that provide for the measurement of online spend for large brands. They require tagging all of the touch points of the outbound effort: search, direct mail, email, display, social, and the website. There is a robust effort around data collection and analytics that involves the application of complex predictive models. The results score traffic as anonymous viewers, linking the ad dollars to its viewing source and delivering estimates on return on investment. This kind of effort is costly and perhaps overkill for a political campaign with a million viewers and a life cycle of 12 to 18 months.

Brands, retailers, financial institutions, publications and now politicians recognize the need for attribution and the ad tech industry will eventually respond. New solutions for attribution are emerging that will link the data mining efforts of audience building to the viewers and the visitors across multiple channels. Getting there will involve alternative targeting methods that will protect privacy but will continue us down a path that moves us beyond the standard cookie.

The good news is that the vendors that support marketing in politics will be on top of these advances for 2016. There is no doubt that a practical solution for attribution will soon be part of the suite of tools already available to connect campaigns with their best voters.

MediaPost article: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/241590/the-tricky-tales-of-political-attribution.html