Last Click Attribution Overlooks Many Marketing Touchpoints, Warns Augusto Beato

Portland SEO's Augusto Beato warned that reliance on last-click attribution keeps marketers from seeing the long-term impact of marketing expenditures.

Last click attribution assigns credit to the last touchpoint in a customer’s journey that in turn overlooks assisting touchpoints in the customers' journey.

"Realizing how to measure and maximize ROI on spending is still a challenge with most focusing on short-term responses,” said Beato, who is the CEO of Portland SEO.

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Multi-channel attribution models are recommended to get a more accurate picture of the long-term impact of marketing spend and the customer’s journey and all touchpoints leading to conversion.

He noted that it should be about creating parameters to determine how investment is performing versus the previous year and budgets, as well as regular updates on campaigns.

Beato was reacting to a recent survey conducted by Mediahawk that revealed that 23 percent of marketers questioned were using first or last click models and a third do not currently have a marketing attribution model.

However, when asked if they thought that marketing attribution was important 81 percent of those surveyed agreed or strongly agreed that it was.

That is in part because attribution, which allows marketers to see which channels are the most profitable and whether their marketing efforts are bringing a return on investment, remains difficult.

Matthew Chappell, a partner at Gain Theory, admits that while last-click attribution is the most commonly used, it is also widely criticized and sometimes ridiculed because of its simplicity.

When asked which channels they struggle to attribute conversions to, 38 percent said traditional media advertising and 32 percent said offline marketing materials.

However, many marketers use Google Analytics for attribution, a tool that does not attribute offline conversions.

Although social media is now deemed essential in marketing strategies across most industries, 31 percent of the marketers are still struggling to prove the ROI of this channel.

This is because consumers are accessing their social media accounts from various devices and methods, such as mobile apps, desktop, mobile web, and tablet, making attributing all leads and conversions from social media still a challenge for some marketers.