Attribution & Adobe Marketing Cloud

Attri­bu­tion is a mas­sive top­ic and cru­cial to mea­sur­ing your business’s per­for­mance. There are a mul­ti­tude of approach­es you can take, and plen­ty of options avail­able in exist­ing technology.

Adobe has a num­ber of attri­bu­tion solu­tions, depend­ing on your busi­ness goals. Not sure what’s the best fit for you? Take a look at the fol­low­ing busi­ness objec­tives, con­sid­er which match up to your cur­rent goals, and learn what Adobe’s Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Cloud can deliver.

Optimising Paid Digital Advertising Channels

Say you’re in the ear­ly stages of your attri­bu­tion matu­ri­ty, or you’re respon­si­ble for one or more paid dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing chan­nels. You’re look­ing for more vis­i­bil­i­ty into the paid aspects of your cus­tomer jour­ney – what the val­ue of each of those touch­points is and how you can deliv­er both a more con­sis­tent and per­son­alised mes­sage cross-channel.

Because Adobe Media Opti­miz­er opti­mis­es your Paid Search, Paid Social, & Dis­play activ­i­ty in one solu­tion, it has the abil­i­ty to pro­vide you with assist reports from the chan­nel lev­el down to the key­word lev­el, deliv­er­ing vis­i­bil­i­ty of your cus­tomers’ jour­neys with­in the con­text of those three paid chan­nels. These insights can be actioned by apply­ing one of five core attri­bu­tion mod­els – first click, last click, even dis­tri­b­u­tion, weight first more, or weight last more. The busi­ness impact of run­ning a par­tic­u­lar mod­el can be quan­ti­fied lever­ag­ing Media Optimizer’s sig­na­ture fore­cast sim­u­la­tions, so you are con­fi­dent your choice is informed by your data. Addi­tion­al analy­sis regard­ing attri­bu­tion mod­el selec­tion and busi­ness impact is avail­able via our Account Man­age­ment teams, who are able run a num­ber of bespoke pieces of analy­sis includ­ed as part of both tech-only and full ser­vice relationships.

If you are already work­ing with anoth­er niche attri­bu­tion tech­nol­o­gy, Adobe Media Opti­miz­er can lever­age data through part­ner­ing with these spe­cial­ist tech­nolo­gies where request­ed by clients.

Understanding the Value of Multi-Channel Advertising in the Context of the Wider Business

If the con­cept of attri­bu­tion has wider trac­tion with­in your busi­ness, and you need to be able to demon­strate the val­ue each chan­nel is deliv­er­ing with­in the con­text of the wider busi­ness to bud­get and strate­gise appro­pri­ate­ly, Adobe Ana­lyt­ics pro­vides a cen­tral hub of data so you can start com­par­ing apples to apples. With its core track­ing func­tion­al­i­ty, Adobe Ana­lyt­ics pulls all your online data, plus anonymised offline data that can be linked to a cus­tomer id (i.e. CRM data like gold mem­ber sta­tus, con­tract type, and con­tract end date). The reports and analy­sis avail­able with­in Ana­lyt­ics Stan­dard enable you to see a cross-chan­nel cam­paigns view, get­ting to the bot­tom of what types of adver­tis­ing are dri­ving val­ue and how the cus­tomer jour­ney is shaped.

As Adobe Ana­lyt­ics plugs into all solu­tions with the Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud, one of the addi­tion­al ben­e­fits of util­is­ing the mar­ket­ing cloud from an attri­bu­tion per­spec­tive is hav­ing all your activ­i­ties and con­ver­sions across solu­tions flow­ing in and out of one** sin­gle source of truth** your busi­ness analy­sis can rely on. What val­ue does that deliv­er? Well, besides con­sis­ten­cy in report­ing, which is a huge strug­gle for many busi­ness­es, you can do things like share that exact same seg­ment with Adobe Tar­get to fur­ther dri­ve the cus­tomer jour­ney towards con­ver­sion, tai­lor­ing the land­ing page with rel­e­vant prod­ucts or an offer.

Full View on Channel Value + Actioning Custom Algorithmic Attribution Models

For those of you who are quite far along your attri­bu­tion jour­ney, and are look­ing for an enter­prise solu­tion to help you answer ques­tions like _how can we bet­ter under­stand the ROI of our paid and owned activ­i­ties to report against our business’s core annu­al objec­tives _or what addi­tion­al prof­it mar­gin can we gen­er­ate by employ­ing a cus­tom attri­bu­tion mod­el and how can we cre­ate that, Adobe Ana­lyt­ics Pre­mi­um includ­ing Data Work­bench is the solu­tion for you.

Not only does it pro­vide full attri­bu­tion capa­bil­i­ties across chan­nels, it is also pow­ered by sophis­ti­cat­ed algo­rithms that enable you to employ a cus­tom attri­bu­tion mod­el that is linked to your business’s unique data. This attri­bu­tion mod­el is then applied across all chan­nels, both online and offline, includ­ing call cen­tres, CRMs, direct mail, and so on.

When employed in con­junc­tion with oth­er solu­tions in the Mar­ket­ing Cloud, not only do you have one cen­tral hub for your data pro­cess­ing and analy­sis, but you also have the abil­i­ty to make more out of the data you already have – be it audi­ence seg­ments, cus­tomer attrib­ut­es, assets, and more.

Combining the Value of Attribution and Audiences

Anoth­er sophis­ti­cat­ed use of attri­bu­tion analy­sis is com­bin­ing** who your cus­tomers are and how they are inter­act­ing with your brand** with more **advanced attri­bu­tion method­olo­gies **seen above. This enables you to acti­vate your seg­men­ta­tion data to bid for and buy ad space against more advanced logic.

Adobe Audi­ence Man­ag­er – the DMP with­in Adobe’s Mar­ket­ing Cloud – cap­tures inter­ac­tions a user has across media chan­nels at an anonymised id lev­el, so it gives a very clear pic­ture of that user and their inter­ac­tion with your brand. What you can then do is push seg­ment data into an advanced ana­lyt­ics tech­nol­o­gy, like Adobe Ana­lyt­ics Pre­mi­um (via native inte­gra­tion), or into a spe­cial­ist attri­bu­tion solu­tion (via APIs or batch). This data can then be run against process­es like propen­si­ty mod­el­ling to under­stand and score a segment’s like­li­hood to con­vert, for exam­ple, and then **re-ingest­ed into Audi­ence Man­ag­er **to help aid in seg­men­ta­tion and bid­ding strategies.

The pow­er of using this with­in the con­text of the Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud is these audi­ence seg­ments, whose val­ue has been analysed in Adobe Ana­lyt­ics and then assigned with­in Audi­ence Man­ag­er, can then be shared in Adobe Media Opti­miz­er, where infor­ma­tion like propen­si­ty scores can be lever­aged to make smarter buy­ing deci­sions across paid adver­tis­ing chan­nels – going above and beyond the opti­mi­sa­tion Media Opti­miz­er already pro­vides. All this per­for­mance data is then fed back into Adobe Ana­lyt­ics, where fur­ther analy­sis, attri­bu­tion, and report­ing can be done with­in the wider busi­ness con­text. Effec­tive­ly, your data and the val­ue of your data comes full cir­cle, dri­ving results at a bet­ter mar­gin against your over­all busi­ness goals.

In attri­bu­tion, as in all things dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing, and indeed, busi­ness – it all comes down to what your core busi­ness goal is and your cur­rent chal­lenges in achiev­ing that goal. Where you are in your business’s dig­i­tal matu­ri­ty will also play a role in what solu­tion is most appro­pri­ate for you now, in a year, in three years. The impor­tant thing to keep in mind is not only what will help you solve your imme­di­ate issues, but also how what you are putting in place now can scale for the future matu­ri­ty of your business.