No industry has better adapted to the new times than the advertising industry. The sector has transformed in recent years, achieving increasingly sophisticated tools to understand how users interact with a brand or purchase a product. Some of these tools are attribution models and ad servers. Learn about the approach that changed managing successful digital marketing campaigns.
Attribution models determine how to allocate the value of a conversion or sale across multiple touchpoints or marketing channels. These models help elucidate the contribution of each channel in the conversion process, allowing for more realistic decision-making regarding the business and efficient budget optimization.
There are many attribution models, so it can be complex to determine which one is best to use: it will depend on the client’s objectives and the strategy we implement to achieve the results. This is the challenge that digital marketing specialists face every day because we will obtain different insights depending on the model we choose. Furthermore, each platform (Meta, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, etc.) has an attribution model that will report different results.
The importance of ad servers
An ad server is a technological platform that allows advertisers and publishers to optimize, manage, and distribute ads across numerous paid channels. Furthermore, they track the step-by-step actions taken by the user, taking into account the traceability of the channels involved in the obtained result. Ad servers make it possible to have data from different integrated platforms and a more complete vision of how the channels contribute and help. This way, we know where and when each channel has impacted and contributed, thus enabling more realistic decisions.
Here is an example that can help us better understand it:
Let’s imagine that a user receives a Meta ad but makes the purchase the next day through a Google search. The campaign will count that conversion as its own, since the Meta attribution model is 7 days after the click and 1 day after the view. On the other hand, the client’s CRM, typically governed by a Last Click model, will register that conversion in Google Ads.
The client must understand that without this impact from Meta, the user would not have searched and purchased the product.
This always leads to a conflict regarding the volume of conversions with the client. The first thing to remember is that each platform will report a result, which hardly coincides because each platform reports what it sees. How can these discrepancies be reduced? With an ad server, it is possible to have complete traceability.
Importantly, there is no universally right or wrong attribution model. The choice of attribution model depends on the objective, the channels used, the user behavior, and the available data. Comparing data between advertising platforms with an ad server is simple and transparent.
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