There has been a lot of talk recently about attribution. And answering these questions has been one of the biggest challenges facing the modern marketer:
“Is my marketing campaign working?”
“Does that last click really deserve all the credit?”
“Where then am I spending more than I should?”
While many tools have been developed that attempt to solve these problems, the latest tool is Google Attribution.
During this year’s Google Marketing Next conference, the company unveiled a new beta tool that aims to track and report on the role of various marketing strategies in a customer’s buying decision.
Recent News: Google Now Compressing Display Ads with Brotli
Who Gets the Credit?
The Google Attribution tool helps marketers answer the critical question: Is my marketing working? Click To Tweet“For the first time, Google Attribution makes it possible for every marketer to measure the impact of their marketing across channels – all in one place, and at no additional cost,” says Google.
Google intends for Attribution to become a one-stop shop for evaluating marketing campaigns. To achieve this, Google includes market roundup strategy, ad spend and feedback in the tool, making it an attractive option for marketers who aren’t satisfied with last-click models.
Regardless of device or marketing channel, Google Attribution will be able to reach and analyze the data for a sufficient understanding of customer behavior.
The tool will also be integrated with other offerings. As Google puts it, “Integrations with AdWords, Google Analytics and DoubleClick Search make it easy to bring together data from all your marketing channels. The result is a complete view of your performance.”
Google also insists that the tool is easy to use – and it’s free. Well, mostly. It does plan to charge for the enterprise plan.
What You Can Do with Attribution Reports
As a marketer, you need to understand how much of an impact your marketing spend is having at all touch points in the customer buying journey. Attribution will give you insights into the ROI of upper- and mid-funnel interactions, which help influence new customers.
You can also tell how customers who are using different devices respond to your marketing.
Recent News: Bing Ads Now Lets You Advertise by Device
It could be argued that Google is getting too much influence over digital marketing by integrating its other services into Attribution. However, while this is true, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Since so many marketers use these services anyway, they probably don’t mind using more of Google as long as it pays back. For these marketers, the integration is an advantage.
At the moment, Google Attribution is in beta. However, the company says there will be a deeper rollout within the next few months.
