How attribution will prove most valuable to marketers

Offline attribution certainly seems to be a hot topic right now, with announcements from big industry players coming thick and fast.

According to recent Facebook blogs, 90% of sales still take place in physical stores. They state that people rely on their mobile phones to navigate both online and offline shopping journeys and expect interactions with businesses to be more relevant, meaningful, and actionable. Yes, their pushing their latest offerings in conversion tools with an aim to track and re-engage offline audiences. But I agree with their sentiment.

Problem is, it’s only tracking the impact for their advertisers that they are talking about – for Facebook advertising campaigns. What about the rest of our media?

The noise around offline attribution and uses for location data in general is increasing massively; it’s becoming mainstream, which is great. But also, increasingly crowded.

For offline attribution and re-engagement of offline audiences to really prove valuable to marketers, it needs to be media-agnostic. It needs to span all channels in use and I’m not just talking digital, I’m talking more traditional media too. Even traditional OOH campaigns can have measurable attribution and ROI applied to them in today’s mobile-driven world.

One of the many dangers of Facebook (and there is many) is that they will take even more of the advertising market share, purely on the basis that marketers can easily track their offline ROI when they spend with them.

This doesn’t need to be the case and publishers, this is where you step in.

Apps which already use location are collecting thousands of first party data points about users and their location – all of which can be used to create intelligent, AI driven insight on consumer audiences and behaviour and applied to attribution against media spend when combined with the right intelligence platform.

First party location data is the gold standard of the industry. It’s what everyone wants. Why? Because it’s accurate, it’s precise – down to a 1 metre radius in most cases, and definitely ours. Other options for data attribution comes from bid-streams, and we all know the flaws in this (less than 1% accuracy is the most recent stat I’ve seen).

The problem for publishers is scale. On your own you are not enough, but come together with others, via one intelligence platform, and everyone will benefit. Apps can earn additional revenue for their high-quality data and media buyers will have the combined audience scale to validate the ROI for offline actions across ALL their media channels, not just one small part. Which means others can win. Not just Facebook and the other media titans.