Mobile vs. Attribution: Web & App

The word “attribution” is increasingly common in discussions, and its importance will likely surge in the coming months, especially concerning the interplay between websites and apps.

This is driven by several factors:
✅  Multi-device Usage: People are using more devices to access the internet, making it harder to track their journeys.
✅  Shifting Priorities: Businesses are focusing on loyalty and optimizing complex purchase channels, leading to a greater need for rich first-party data. This has increased the importance of apps in sectors like finance, travel, and retail, while improvements in web technology have boosted its relevance in areas like gaming.
✅ Complex User Journeys: As users switch between devices and platforms, their journeys become more complex, often spanning both web and app environments. We’ll see a rise in web and app interactions, further complicating attribution.
✅  Privacy Changes: Privacy limitations are restricting access to deterministic data, forcing a shift towards probabilistic solutions. This will “prepare mentally” many marketing teams for more serious looking at complex user journeys that are impossible to analyse using simple conversion tracking.
✅  As online advertising costs rise, marketers are increasingly exploring less measurable, but potentially more affordable, channels like offline advertising. This trend is particularly evident in the gaming industry, where traditional methods like television or non-standard methods (ie. online tv) are gaining renewed attention.
✅  As those trends are getting more visible, data and attribution providers are developing innovative solutions to measure and estimate previously untrackable user journeys.
✅  As UA sources being supported by AI, are getting similar to each other in main principles (ie. CPA bidding vs tROAS bidding), size of UA teams is growing slower than scale of UA spend. Additionally connection between product and Growth is growing. With that many marketing teams is trying to diminish silos existing in UA teams (ie. separate team working with Google vs separate working with Facebook only) what finally is helping discussions about attribution (as it decreases that thinking “my traffic source vs their traffic source”).
✅  The big difference, challenge in UA sources is measurement side of UA; ie. two traffic sources may work on similar principles, although they are defining conversions taken into bidding in different way. That increases the number of data driven people in marketing teams, increasing number of people who understand those important of those nuances between measurement topics (and understanding that nowadays not many things can be measured with 100% accuracy).
✅  Growth of advanced creative strategies, easiness to create custom creatives will help here as well.

Any thoughts, other opinions?

#attribution #measurement #apps #gaming #insights #data