Nic Pietersma presented Attribution or Misattribution? How to make digital measurement less awful. Nic put on his commercial hat to discuss common errors seen repeated time and time again. He discussed the idea that there may not be a single right way to do things, but recognising the wrong way is the first step on the path to improvement.

1. Attribution or Misattribution?
MAY 2018

2. 2
Attribution or Misattribution?
How to make digital measurement less awful

3. INTRODUCTION TO EBIQUITY
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Independent consultancy helping clients make better
Media and Marketing investment decisions

4. IN THE ROOM TODAY
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Ebiquity Effectiveness: Our expertise lies in
measuring and improving ROI. We are commercial first!
Not an attribution
specialist
Nic Pietersma
Business Director

5. 5
1. VALIDATE AND VERIFY

6. VALIDATE AND VERIFY
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We need one version of the truth
The most harmful words…

7. GEOTESTING
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Every attribution manager should consider geotesting
to validate the results coming out of their system

8. Ratings/Adspend
RegionalQuotes(Indexed)
Ratings/Adspend
Media Upweight Regions (Test Index)
Media Downweight Regions (Control Index)
GEOTESTING
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This is what a successful geotest looks like; the size of the gap
can be quantified to calculate an ROI
Testing PeriodIndexing Period
Re-Indexing
Period
Quantify Incremental BenefitEstablish Regional “Match” Establish “Tail”

9. Ratings/Adspend
RegionalQuotes(Indexed)
Ratings/Adspend
Media Upweight Regions (Test Index)
Media Downweight Regions (Control Index)
GEOTESTING
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If you have anchored your ROI expectations exclusively on digital
attribution, you may be in for a surprise…
Testing PeriodIndexing Period
Re-Indexing
Period
Quantify Incremental BenefitEstablish Regional “Match” Establish “Tail”

10. VALIDATION RESULTS
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In our experience, some media lines (e.g. digital display)
consistently look worse from a geotesting perspective
First Touch Last Touch Machine Learning Geo Test
Conversions By Measurement Method
Machine Learning Geo Test
Zooming In…

11. PLACEBO TESTING / WHITE SPACE TESTING / AD SWAP TESTING
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Placebo testing is a way of validating the tracking
framework by tagging “as if” advertising is your product
We have seen placebo tests in the
past where the client creative
works no better than the placebo!

12. Verification Tools
• Geotesting
• Econometrics
• Matchback Analysis
• Placebo Testing
• Etc.
Remedies
• Change attribution window
• Only feed viewable impressions into ML
• Use a multiplier ( x 0.2) to calibrate
• Only use attribution for “within channel”
budget decisions
We do not need to blindly trust attribution technology, there
are many tools that can help us verify the numbers
VALIDATION OPTIONS
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13. 13
2. OPTIMISE THE RIGHT THING

14. OPTIMISATION KPI
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Sales Revenue by Channel
In Store E-commerce
Realtime machine learning optimisation sounds great…
but is it right for a business that mostly sells offline?
This business might be better off buying
campaigns on the basis of cost effective
reach rather than optimising to conversion

15. OPTIMISATION BUDGET
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Media Budget
Online in Attribution Online Not In Attribtion Offline
Attribution may also ‘see’ less of your marketing budget than
you think (esp. if you factor in platforms that do not allow tagging)
An attribution framework only helps
measure a small share of this client’s
marketing budget

16. 16
3. DO THE MATHS

17. DO THE MATHS
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£12.52
£1.14
Digital Radio Regular Radio
Cost Per Thousand
Attribution ROI needs to be sense checked against media costs;
how plausible is your ROI estimate in light of big cost premiums?
£29
£6
VOD TV
x 10x 4.9

18. DO THE MATHS
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53%
73%
88%
94% 97% 99% 100% 100% 100% 100%
14%
25%
41%
53%
67%
80%
89%
95% 98% 100%
<= 1 <= 2 <= 5 <= 10 <= 20 <= 40 <= 80 <= 160 <= 320 <= 3285
%ofDevices/Impressions
Cumulative Devices Cumulative Impressions
VOD: Your realtime optimised campaign might not look great
from a reach and frequency perspective!
THE PROMISE: “The complexity of our optimisation methodology… has thousands of possible
attributes with literally billions of potential combinations from multiple data partners”

19. DO THE MATHS
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If 90% of your volume has a single touchpoint, you may want to
reconsider what role attribution plays in your decision making!
We often find that
media lines such as PPC
and Affiliates have only
one touchpoint (90%+)

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4. DATA HYGIENE

21. DATA HYGIENE
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Attribution & media platforms often don’t talk to the IT
environment that runs the rest of the rest of the business
COMMERCIAL & OPERATIONAL WORLD
Transaction ID
Transaction Value
Basket Details / SKUs
Conversion Rate
Customer ID
Customer Age
Customer Gender
Customer Purchase History
Delivery Address
DIGITAL MEDIA WORLD
Affiliate Reference ID
First Touch Source
Last Touch Source
Campaign ID
Checkout Page ID

22. Campaigns that are not tagged in the first place cannot feed
into any useful analytics, let alone cutting-edge attribution
DATA HYGIENE
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Someone failed…
TIME SERIES TAGGING DATA

23. DATA HYGIENE
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Is the product classification & hierarchy used in the
media tagging sensible?
DISPLAY ADVERT FOR
CORDLESS DRILL
SALE OF THIS FINE
GARDEN SHED

24. 24
5. SOCIALISE THE KNOWLEDGE

25. SOCIALISE THE KNOWLEDGE
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The whole marketing team should understand how Attribution
framework is set up and how ROI is calculated
In practice, we often find
only 1 or 2 people know
how their attribution
framework works!

26. 26
LAST WORD

27. Our Total View Attribution is based on the idea that businesses
have different needs and should use the right tool for the job
Digital
Online
Shareofsales
Share of media
Econometrics
+
Digital
Attribution
Digital
attribution
Digital
attribution
(indirectly)
Econometrics
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28. EBIQUITY
Head Office
Citypoint, One Ropemaker Street
LONDON,
EC2Y 9AW
tel. +44 (0) 20 7650 9600
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CLIENT NAME’s performance with the performances of Ebiquity’s other clients, whose
results are contained in Ebiquity’s databases. These databases contain the mean
performance results achieved by Ebiquity’s clients for a given format in a given period. The
results contained in these databases change over time, as new data is added to the
databases. We undertake no duty to notify or inform our clients as these databases change
over time nor to update any work previously performed by us in light of such revisions to our
databases.
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