Timothy Davis: recommendation

Transcript context

…Sweet. Okay, let's move in a slightly different direction. Attribution, what a sexy, exciting topic. So attribution, basically it's how do you assign credit to a channel and to a campaign, so that you know where growth is coming from, what's working? What's the state of attribution today? What do you find is helpful? How do people do attribution well in today's world? Yeah, I'm a big believer and proponent in multi-touch. I fall into the camp of more time decay. Historically, the research I've done, users tend to forget very quickly where they first found your brand. Yes, you should get credit because this is the first time they saw your brand or the first time they interacted with it, for sure, let's give you some credit for that. But definitely not the reason that they ultimately converted. Linear is fine as well, but overall, I do think attribution by itself is biased. It does not answer the question of whether the person clicking on or seeing an ad would've converted anyways, even in the absence of that ad. This is why numerous companies like Netflix and eBay have done studies to get an understanding of the incrementality of paid advertising campaigns, whether that's conducting GeoX or Conversion Lift tests at important slices of the marketing channel. I know eBay was very popular when they did that experiment. I think it was like 2012, and I'll have a link for you for that as well. Where they ultimately decided to cut almost all of their brand spend, because they found that users were already going to find them through organic anyway, so they were just kind of throwing money out the window. And it was really hard for competitors to get their ads at the top of the page because their quality scores were so low. Okay, so multi-touch is the way you like to think about it. Basically give credits to all of the channels that you detected the user saw your ad on, and less credit if it was further back in time.…

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