The Answer To Attribution? Begin With The Business Problem

Cross-screen targeting based on AI marketing data analysis to map the user journey, generate real-time predictions, improve attribution, and increase conversions? It might sound like marketing nirvana, but Appier CEO Chih-Han Yu is making it the new reality.

Marketers are always chasing the next breakthrough in marketing attribution. From the largely outdated single-source model of user attribution to more elaborate probabilistic algorithms, the evolution of data-driven marketing is inseparable from the evolution of our understanding of attribution.

Never before has the demand for attribution been so great. This comes as businesses invest in increasingly disparate, omnichannel marketing campaigns guiding customers along a sales funnel that looks more like two brawling octopi than the traditional inverted pyramid.

Chih-Han Yu, founder and CEO of Taipei-based technology company Appier, had an epiphany chasing the answer to attribution from an artificial intelligence perspective: He realised he’d never find it unless he focused on business problems first and let the technology flow on from his customers’ specific demands.

The most common need he found in the marketplace? Cross-device analytics.

“Using our platform, [for example], we can attribute that the user always checks the product on mobile device on their way to work,” Chih-Han said during this episode of The CMO Show podcast. “Then when they go to the office, the users start purchasing on their office desktop. So we can actually link and complete a story of a user journey, across devices.”

Tune in and join hosts Nicole Manktelow and Mark Jones, who spoke to Chih-Han Yu about marketing analytics, attribution, startup culture and of course, Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog robot.