Google Attribution 360 is part of Google’s Analytics 360 Suite of integrated marketing optimization tools. With Google’s takeover of Adometry, a start-up specializing in measuring marketing impact in 2014, the company interrogated the acquisition of media attribution into its exciting Google Analytics Premium and made it a standalone product, called Google Attribution 360. There is a paid and free version. The paid version is Attribution 360, and the free version is called Attribution. The focus here will be mostly on Attribution 360.
Regardless of device or marketing channel, Google wants Attribution to be a home for evaluating marketing campaigns. By creating a tight loop between strategies, advertisement spent and feedback, Google aims to make the tool attractive to marketers that feel last-click models don’t sufficiently explain customer behavior.
New machine learning-powered methods enable marketers to model the relative contribution of disparate advertising efforts. This is a much more informative method of evaluation. In the real world, video ads, banner ads, emails and other materials all work in consonance to drive conversions — it doesn’t make sense for the final social media ad to get all the credit.
As part of the most widely used analytics platform in the world, Google Attribution 360 is the only enterprise attribution modelling platform with native connections to your Google performance and advertising data.
Attribution 360 allows marketers to combine offline and online data to measure and optimize conversion across campaigns and cross-channels. In addition, Google Attribution 360 is a tool to manage, gain insights and visualize data, as well as tests web content. As such, Google Attribution 360 gives you a panoramic view to help you optimize your complete marketing program.
That is since, marketing strategy is carried out through multiple channels, both traditional and digital. Each member of the audience likely receives the message at multiple touchpoints, both offline and on. So measuring the results of a campaign by “channel only” gives a narrow view. Previously, assigning credit to a sale or other conversion (“attribution”) was limited to just a few touchpoints.
Advertisers can send conversion attribution results to their search and display campaigns for bidding optimization.
Google coined the term “micro-moments” to describe the fractions of time people turn to a device throughout the customer journey. They might:
• See commercial for a product on TV,
• Then pick up their smartphone and use an app to find out if there is a store in their neighborhood,
• open another app to read consumer reviews of the product,
• And then go online to see if they can find a discount.
Use it to improve your users’ experiences, no matter where they find you, and invest your marketing budget more efficiently. It’s like getting prescription glasses after you’ve gotten used to squinting.
Google Attribution 360’s methodology is based on two models. That is the Matched Pairs model and the Game Theory. Matched pair model is an experimental design technique used in propensity modelling that matches pairs of subjects that share a common variable and randomly assigns a marketing treatment to each. Here Google uses the principle of matched pairs, examines user-level records of impressions and uses conversions to determine the influence of specific tactics on the marketer’s goals. Game theory can be defined as a model dealing with competitive situations where the outcome of a participant’s choice of action depends critically on the actions of other participants. Shapely Value, used in cooperative game theory, estimates the importance of each player and the payoff one can reasonably expect.
What sets Google Attribution 360 apart is that it is integrated within the larger Google Analytics 360 Suite. The Google Analytics 360 Suite includes digital analytics tools, audience data, and a data management platform. Plus Google Analytics 360 Suite is united with Google’s programmatic advertising platform such as DoubleClick Search and DoubleClick Bid Manager. This package also utilizes Google’s unique assets like searching data, cross device identity and Google’s best trade mark that of uniting unsigned data from users based on their sign in history.
Summary of Attribution 360’s main capabilities:
Digital Attribution – Modelling that includes every touchpoint on the customer journey — an eye-opening experience if you’ve been limited to just first-touch, last-touch, or arbitrary attribution models. Marketing Mix Modelling – Adds offline channels such as radio and print advertising to the digital mix for an aggregated view. It also offers insight into how your business might be impacted by outside conditions like weather and economics. TV Attribution – Measures how much of an impact your television ads have on sales by combining ad airings data with digital search data for analysis.
This solution is easier to use than most other solutions, it is also flexibility and allows for robust marketing attribution modelling. But you will definitely need a savvy engineer familiar with web marketing to properly implement it and the support of your own analyst to clearly define what you want to look at. Still, this solution allows access to a vast array of data. You can give any member of your organization access to a GA account, instead of dealing with a limited number of licenses. This is a convenient and effective way to get people looking at relevant data. It is thus clear why clients such as HP, BT, Starbucks and Twitter are making use of this solution.
What the solution lacks is more online documentation for users. This could be overcome if the support service can improve. Mostly clients have to sources the answers unassisted. Isn’t customizable enough, especially compared to some of the other big analytics programs like Omniture/SiteCatalyst [now Adobe Analytics].
Consider this solution if you are an enterprise that employs the 360 Suite, as Attribution 360 would integrate easily with the existing framework; or if you invest heavily in media through AdWords or DoubleClick, as you’d benefit from data sharing. But by using the Google Attribution 360 tool, your down-to-the-minute TV ad airings data is analysed along with digital data collected in Google Analytics 360 to provide performance metrics on exposure, engagement, behavior, and conversion. Marketing Mix Modelling allows you to view performance across all channels and overlay external factors (such as seasonality) on top to get a clear view of your marketing efforts. You are able to view the impact of view-thru impressions from DoubleClick.
