attribution

Meta will now measure social interactions like likes, shares and comments under a new “engage-through attribution” category, replacing click-through as the default.

For most of the last decade, performance marketing was rewarded for momentum. Spend efficiently. Scale quickly. Optimize continuously. If the line went up and to the right, few questions followed. But that era is ending, because performance without accountability is no longer credible.

The IAB unveiled its Project Eidos on Monday, a new program uniting its numerous measurement initiatives under one banner.

Traffic is down, but publisher content is still driving purchases. Partnerize’s new attribution model lets publishers see what’s working and strike fair compensation deals.

Attribution measurement is still a mess; video podcasting struggles with effective advertising; and NIL deals are taking off for student athletes.

The Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) is a data-driven advertising metric that’s been around for many years but is now reaching mainstream, or to some at least, revered status.

Ron Jacobson took the classic programmatic startup route. Which is to say, he pivoted randomly from a software job at a bank (well, the New York Fed), landed at an ad tech company and later founded his own ad tech startup before getting acquired by yet another ad tech company.

With a growing array of platforms and channels competing for consumer attention, advertisers have been increasingly looking for ways to understand which ads and placements drive engagement and sales – not just engagement and sales that would have happened anyway but true incrementality.

Incrementality measurement may be a sound methodology, but online ad platforms are not really bringing a steady river of new-to-brand customers with their incrementality-based solutions.

Meta and Mozilla’s new browser-based attribution system for web ads appears to solve an interesting math problem. But if applied to real-world advertising, it will increase privacy risks for users, writes Raptive’s Don Marti.

2024 was a year of hectic change for ad measurement. These are a few of the new ad attribution trends and techniques programmatic advertiser should know going into 2025.

Here’s an uncomfortable question for any data-driven advertiser: Is there a good way to measure and attribute marketing campaigns?

Many brand operators feel like they need good general guidelines for attribution. Plus, what’s stepping retail media standardization?

Fixating on ROAS makes it harder to figure out how certain parts of a campaign perform, especially now that retail media buys often include other, less performance-focused channels like display and CTV as audience extension.

TV ad buying platform Cadent acquires AdTheorent, setting its sights on omnichannel. Also in this episode: The less-than-kosher attribution game that retail media networks are playing with brands.

The vast majority of advertisers who buy ads in video games (91%) no longer consider gaming to be an experimental media channel. But ad spend in games still lags behind audience engagement.

The third-party cookie actually stymied the development of digital advertising. Here’s what the cookie got wrong and what its inheritors need to get right.

As bold and ambitious as Privacy Sandbox is, it’s rolling out with a lot of confusion and ambiguity. And there’s plenty about the new paradigm that we don’t currently understand.

Here are four common errors that can curtail the success of any influencer campaign – and advice for getting it right.

Are the big players building a more privacy-friendly advertising ecosystem in the right way? Or are they just cementing their control?

Until universal standards are set and adopted by retailers, marketers need to ask some boring yet fundamental questions about the metrics currently in use if they want to assess and compare performance across retailers. 

Ad measurement and attribution are in crisis – but maybe that’s a good thing says Andrew Covato, founder and managing director of measurement consultancy Growth by Science. “It’s time for change.”

TV and audio incrementality have traditionally been difficult to measure, but technological shifts have produced a strong playbook for testing incrementality across these mediums.

As cookies, pixels and SDK data become increasingly unreliable, almost all of the large ad platforms are pushing server-side implementations to get conversion information from advertisers.

Finding new customers is hard work. The online adult retailer Adam and Eve is tapping into machine learning to help.

The digital advertising industry has been too focused on data perfection, according to Analytic Partners CEO Nancy Smith. But as data disappears due to signal loss, brands have an opportunity to regroup around “commercial analytics,” a different measurement approach focused on driving outcomes with less user-focused data.

Advertisers of all stripes are rethinking their ad measurement and attribution strategy. But the burst of new incrementality testing models, in-housing programs, multitouch attribution and media mix modeling efforts haven’t exactly led to a renaissance of understanding how measurement works.

Google Analytics began 2022 with an important goal to migrate its entire customer base onto Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Universal Analytics (UA), the longtime baseline analytics service, was to sunset by October 2023. UA was set for shutdown next year, but Google Analytics announced on Thursday that the company will push that deadline to July 2024.

Multitouch attribution has fallen into disrepair. Facebook and Google platform attribution is a mess. User-level tracking is going the way of cigarette smoking during a pregnancy. So, what’s left for digital advertisers who need to bring performance measurement back to their media plans? Incrementality testing, it seems. “I was a little bit skeptical as to […]

Call it the rise of TikTokalytics. A group of young attribution and analytics startups, the newest wielding particular talent on TikTok, have inherited the Earth from multi-touch attribution (MTA) companies.