How do we measure success in marketing?
Well, as it turns out, this very question is on the minds of approximately 60% of marketers who aim to change their attribution model in 2017, according to the 2017 State of Performance Marketing report by AdRoll, the performance marketing platform.
This result is yet another example of the continued fundamental shift in how marketers evaluate digital marketing performance.
While 65% of marketers, according to the report, value single-click attribution models, they can be problematic because they are only able to measure a portion of the audience.
The potential change for future models of attribution is a blended approach. This incorporates customer touchpoints, including both ad views and click, prior to the purchase.
If marketers are looking to change approaches in the next year, a successful model would be one that involves the simplicity of click-based attribution, while accounting for the cumulative effect of views, according to the report.
Industry professionals have intensified their interest in marketing measurement — specifically, better evaluating their efforts and optimizing their decision processes. The results confirm that almost 75% of marketers find attribution critical or very important to marketing success and nearly 60% reported that they plan to take the definitive step of changing their attribution model in 2017.
“Marketing as a discipline is increasingly viewed as a growth driver with direct revenue accountability,” says Adam Berke, president and CMO of AdRoll. “This is causing marketers to look for smarter and more sophisticated ways to connect their activities to actual business metrics beyond the rudimentary last click models that have been around for the last 15 years.”
The report also discovered a greater rise of programmatic initiatives in marketers approach to digital marketing. Over 50 percent of survey respondents said they are currently investing more than half of their budgets in programmatic initiatives alone — that’s up from 32 percent of respondents in 2015.
Furthermore, a majority of marketers stated that their email campaigns populate with content specific to a person’s actions taken online, however, issues still remain with integration.
Almost 70% of marketers surveyed in this year’s report claimed that their email campaigns are dynamic, based on user behavior — expanding their aims beyond traditional batch sends. Yet what marketers struggled with in 2016 was integrating their email campaigns with their other marketing efforts, as an estimated 30% of all those who were surveyed said that they are “barely somewhat” integrated or “have no integration whatsoever.”
The AdRoll study was conducted with third-party research company Qualtrics to survey 1,000 U.S. marketers.
