Attribution in digital marketing means attributing credits to various touch points along the consumer’s purchase journey. It is getting increasingly challenging to assign values across the media mix that will fairly allow budgets to be formulated. Business analytics using Google data is an obvious method but riddled with inconsistencies as it is very difficult to measure which part of the funnel made the major impact. There are methods known as first click and last click. In the first click method, the entire credit goes to the top of the funnel where the first query was made, while in the other entire credit goes to the last click end of funnel. This method will soon expire as marketers have realized this is not holistic. Google has also started rectifying ways to integrate online with offline methods. A metric known as “in-store visits” uses signals to deduce online-to-offline impact using data from disparate sources such as Google Maps, Wi-Fi and GPS. Another channel is cross-device alignment as final sale could be made on some device but another one was where the initial information was captured. Holistic campaigns allow multi-channel tracking, long term relation building, personalized content and non-linear brand connect with customer. Personalized campaigns are now in vogue in order to fortify customer relationships.

Source:http://searchengineland.com/rethinking-todays-attribution-problem-260767