By Chad Recchia
Google is rolling out a new marketing platform that it hopes becomes the industry standard for evaluating the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
The tech giant announced the beta roll out of Google Attribution at the company’s Marketing Next conference on Tuesday. Attribution aims to move marketer’s away from focusing primarily on the last click that comes before consumers make buying decisions. The primary goal of Google’s latest tool is to help marketers better understand how their advertising dollars are being optimized across different channels and devices.
Google isn’t the first company to tackle the subject of multi-touch attribution. For example, Adobe offers cross-channel marketing evaluation through its analytics platform. Google, though, believes that Attribution can serve as a more accurate and faster solution than its competition.
Machine learning is key to Attribution’s marketing evaluation efforts. The product assigns weighted values to each touchpoint, offering marketers a big-picture look at what contributes most in the purchasing process. As we all know, a variety of materials work in conjunction to push a consumer to make a buying decision. Google Attribution aims to make sure that everything in a marketing campaign, and not just the last ad a person is exposed to, receives the appropriate credit.
Here’s what Babak Pahlavan, Google’s senior director of product management for analytics and measurement, had to say about Attribution, as quoted by Ad Age:
“It creates a prediction model that learns by weighting a set of touchpoints on how likely a user is to purchase something,” Babak Pahlavan, senior director of product management for analytics measurement at Google, said. “The presence and absence of marketing touchpoints across channels and across campaigns will either decrease or increase the likelihood of a conversion.”
In addition to the beta version, Google also announced Attribution 360, which possesses similar characteristics plus some additional features. Attribution 360 originated from Google’s acquisition of a startup called Adometry that focused on evaluating marketing influence. It will be available for purchase at the annual price of $150,000.
Meanwhile, the beta version of Attribution is currently free to use and a wider release is planned for later in 2017.
