The power of real-time attribution in a multi-channel world

The rise of emerging technologies has changed consumers’ behavior. Artificial intelligence, augmented reality and voice assistants have pushed consumers into a new form of interaction with brands and their content. Marketers have been introduced to a new world where a campaign is not restricted to traditional channels, but they need to shift their strategy to speak to their target audience.


Moreover, the increased mobile usage has created a multi-channel world that goes beyond one single device. This brings out the challenge for marketers to create campaigns that overlap channels successfully. There comes the need to explore which channel has been more effective and which part of their campaign has been the best-performing.

The speed of access to new content has also turned consumers more demanding. They tend to be more impatient after being used to access everything through their phones in a matter of seconds.

How do marketers react to this change and how can they effectively measure their campaigns?

Making the most of attribution

Attribution aims to help marketers understand the success of their campaigns. It can help them explore the most effective touchpoints, or else, the elements of their strategy that led to the highest number of conversions.

The traditional idea of attribution had to do with the process of discovering the last touchpoint that led to a conversion. For example, if your campaign’s goal was to increase your number of email subscribers, the number of downloads of a gated ebook could be attributed as the reason of the increased subscribers. This measurement may be enough, but you may be missing further opportunities to understand your funnel.

This may involve a growth of subscribers that may have also occurred from an improved social presence and an optimized messaging in your paid ads.

By attributing the success to a particular ebook, you may be missing the chance to understand how your potential customers interact with you and what they like most from your online presence.

A modern approach to attribution is about analyzing the complete marketing funnel to spot all the touchpoints that played a key role in your ultimate goals.

It’s about focusing equally on all stages of a campaign to acknowledge how all of them can play a crucial role to your objectives.

That’s when the discussion about real-time attribution comes up among marketers who seek for improved success.

Embracing real-time attribution

As marketing becomes more sophisticated, it’s important to scale up your attribution strategy to analyze your results in the most detailed way.

Real-time attribution can help you extract the right insights to supercharge your campaign. The idea of real-time attribution requires the use of technology and the tools that will help you understand the performance of your campaign while it takes place.

It can be considered the revolution of marketing measurement, as it can have multiple benefits:

  • Testing creatives
  • Optimizing the message
  • Adjusting the budget based on the current ad performance
  • Understanding your audience’s reactions
  • Gaining useful learnings for your next campaigns
  • Maximising conversions

The power of real-time attribution comes from the fact that you’re adjusting to a new world where technology can leverage your campaigns to extract precise data.

There’s no need anymore to wait for the end of the campaign to explore the touchpoints and their results. The focus on data in real-time can improve your marketing skills and make your campaigns more effective.

Even if it’s not possible to analyze the data in real-time but in ‘almost real-time’, you can still extract great learnings that can help your campaign.

This, of course, requires a focus on data and knowing how to use it when analyzing your campaigns.

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