Type to search

The top three trends in Australian attribution for 2017

Technology & Data

The top three trends in Australian attribution for 2017

Share

Australian marketers struggled with attracting the right talent for attribution modelling this year, and many also had difficulty with data complexity and defining customer journeys.

This article was sponsored by AdRoll to let readers know about ‘The State of Marketing Attribution‘ report.

AdRoll published its first ever global report on the State of Attribution Marketing back in October. Of the 900+ marketers we spoke to, over 200 were Australian. They had some pretty clear thoughts on how attribution was playing out.

We’ve separated out the Australian data to bring you the top three trends for Australian marketers and how they stack up against their global counterparts:

 

1. We’re still stuck on the click

  • 90% of Australian marketers now report they are doing some form of attribution.

When we conducted the survey for our ‘Marketers and Attribution‘ paper in April 2016, only 66% of Australian marketers said they were measuring attribution. That’s a huge increase. It’s also just higher than the global average of 80% of marketers conducting some form of attribution.

Unfortunately, 12 months hasn’t moved the needle on the type of attribution models Aussie marketers are choosing. The most popular attribution models remain first click (44%) and last click (28%). This is despite the fact that 100% of Australian marketers believe that custom attribution is ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ effective.

This does reflect the global trend, with last click (48%) and first click (47%) being the top attribution methods worldwide.

This tells us marketers still favour the simpler methods of attribution while recognising that it isn’t the best way to measure marketing effectiveness. Marketers are investing in building custom attribution technology (55%) so hopefully, we’ll see these numbers shift in the future.

 

2. Data, data, complex data everywhere

It’s clear Australian marketers are struggling with two attribution challenges in particular:

  1. the complexity of data (32%),
  2. and defining their customer journey (30%).

The majority of marketers have their data stored in different silos (their CRM, their agency, their programmatic tools, third party reporting) and what makes it even worse is defining the customer journey has become unpredictable and complex. Customers move between online and offline throughout their path to purchase and it can be hard to measure at all, let alone know how to weight its influence.

Perhaps this is why we’re seeing the huge investment in custom attribution technology and also – as we’ll see below – we’re counting on attribution talent who can assist with attribution modelling as our biggest challenge.

 

3. And we need more people to do the analysis

  • 92% of Australian marketers said they struggled to attract the right talent for attribution modelling.

That’s higher than anywhere else in the world.

Statistical modelling (35%) is the biggest skill gap that Australian marketing departments are facing. This is not surprising as traditionally marketing has not been a department tied to statistics, mathematics and mass data analysis. Campaign tracking was the second biggest skill gap (30%) though we didn’t dig into whether this was related to matching online to offline activity or the ever growing number of digital channels.

The overhaul of what is marketing is definitely underway but it isn’t happening fast enough. Marketers need to do a little marketing of their own to get the message out about the skill sets they’re looking for at the school leaver and university graduate level and target STEM faculties.

 

Overall, Australian marketers are keen and willing to implement attribution modelling but the lack of time (50%), knowledge (33%) and the limitations of technology (33%) are standing in their way.

We have seen exponential growth in attribution knowledge and technology over the past few years and if this continues, we should solve these problems before too long.

 

The full report digs deeper into marketing attribution, its usage, and the effectiveness of attribution models in Australia and around the world.

 

 

AdRoll-State-of-Performace-Marketing-2017-Infographic-AUS

 

 

Image copyright: gstockstudio © 123RF

 

Tags:
Partner

This article was produced by or on behalf of a partner and does not necessarily reflect the views of Marketing Mag or Niche Media.

  • 1

You Might also Like

Leave a Comment