THE ATTRIBUTION FALLACY
Attribution
noun (often attribution to)
Definition: The action of regarding something as being caused by a person or thing.
It’s nice to know what causes a particular outcome or event. Being able to identify causality informs our decisions; the pain of fire burning your skin is a lesson you only need to learn once before you decide to try to avoid touching it again. Unfortunately, most marketing programs aren’t as simple to understand.
Traditional marketing via ‘broadcast’ messages (television, radio, billboard, print advertisement) has always been difficult to measure, because while it’s clear that it can cause brand recognition, relating that recognition to actual sales that may take place months or even years later is at best an abstract art. The lack of causal clarity from old media is a big reason why the world’s marketers have been so quick to embrace the data and direct (single-source) attribution of digital channels like pay-per-click advertising. It seems so simple, a click has a cost, and a clearly traceable outcome (web visit -> conversion -> sale); some simple math, and…Presto! You have a reliable price-per-lead (PPL) average from your paid-search campaigns.
However, if you dig a little deeper you quickly realize that the single-source attribution of paid search advertising is a lie! Your PPL calculations are false! Does that mean we’re doomed to return to the days of guessing whether Mikey eating the cereal in the ad or Mikey supposedly dying from pop-rocks and coke ingestion in The Enquirer was the real cause for our uplift in Life cereal sales? No, but it does mean we need to take another look at the art of attribution in a data-rich world in order to understand the real value of our marketing efforts.
For example, they call it “Pay-Per-Click” advertising because you PAY only when someone CLICKS. But what happens to all those hundreds or thousands of additional times where your ad is shown but doesn’t get a click? Your brand and your message still gets directly within the sight of your target consumer. Ask anyone paying for signs, billboards, fliers, television ads or product placement; there IS value to having a brand impression even if it doesn’t lead directly to a conversion or sale. In fact, most people search more than once for a product or service they’re in need of, and the resonant effect of your ever-present brand is the reason you got the click on the all-important LAST search, not the first one. So, next time you calculate your PPL, be sure to include the value of the thousands of FREE billboard-like brand impressions your campaign got that may end up fulfilled through other channels.
But, it works the other way as well. Not only is paid-search delivering free brand impressions that lead to better long-term customer conversion across ALL of your marketing channels, but it is also stealing the credit for clicks that actually were ’caused’ by another activity. Paid search is an inbound marketing channel reliant on the customer taking action (entering a search term into their browser, map, or virtual assistant) and serves to fulfill the preference or need for your brand, product or service you created in other marketing channels. Most people don’t immediately pick up the phone when they hear a radio ad, but they do hear the brand; and, months later when they search for that service on their smartphone, they unconsciously choose the brand implanted by that radio ad.
Email marketing is another culprit in the fallacy. Cheap, repeatable, and traceable down to the open, click-through and ultimate outcome of each customer, email has become another highly measured and wrongly-credited channel for the modern marketer. I’ve worked with organizations that believe in a linear relationship between a single email blast and a sales outcome. “We sent the email to 5,000 targets and got 23 sales. If we send another one every day we’ll gain over 150 sales this week!”. Forget about the customer fatigue (and thus diminishing returns) from over-using the email channel, the reality is that the email rarely causes the sale. My inbox is currently being bombarded with messages from retailers highlighting the best Black Friday deals on the electronic gadgets I love. If I click through, was it the past relationship with the retailer, the highlight of a product I was already considering, the sale itself, or the email that created that outcome? It was ALL of the above, and there is little proof that I wouldn’t have bought had I not received the email. In fact, I may have purchased at full retail price, so other than costing themselves 15% in revenue they did nothing to affect my behavior.
All this is not to say that you shouldn’t use traceable marketing channels, nor that you shouldn’t study the data to see how to optimize your sales funnel. What it means is that you need to look at your outreach as an orchestra of influence, with each instrument adding to the emotional impact on your customer. Study what happens when you send an email without the radio ad, and try to correlate whether the combination of channels leads to better outcomes. Modern ‘big data’ systems give us the tools to perform multi-channel analysis; and while even it is not a perfect predictor of human behavior, it’s a lot better than the fallacy of single-channel attribution.
Single-Attribution digital marketing channels are, in fact, NOT single-attribution channels. Understanding their role in the multidimensional symphony of influence that creates a customer is the best way to get the most out of all of your marketing efforts.
