Just a quick post to highlight a recent piece of research by attribution modeling company C3 Metrics (thanks AdExchanger!).
There’s more interesting detail at the link, but the headline is that in 37% of all online transactions analyzed, search on a branded term was the very last action before purchase.
That’s obviously bad news for the (too) commonly used “last click / last view” attribution approach. As C3 CEO Mark Hughes put it, “If an advertiser is still using last click analytics, they would mistakenly think that brand search was responsible for a third of their results.”
This research underscores the fact that attribution is important, difficult stuff and requires a lot more horsepower than last click / last view. I think folks like C3 have a great opportunity ahead of them.
C3’s findings echo a great piece of Microsoft research from a couple years back. As I mentioned in my commentary when the Microsoft research came out, it’s clear that a lot of the money that brand marketers are spending on other media (online and offline) is having an impact – whether or not we can measure it precisely today.
Worth some thought.
Andy's Blog 