Customized attribution models

Attribution is an important marketing discipline that allows teams to develop effective budget allocation processes when acquiring new customers for their service. On the web, most companies build these models internally. The web is so mainstream that building these types of tools are very easy to build.

In mobile, attribution is taken as truth directly from a 3rd party attribution partner. The technology here actually has a barrier to entry through the app stores that is not easily built. Third party partners ingest multiple touch points from various sources that drive digital eyeballs and interactions then measure the resulting download – a relevant first step in technology that drives transparency for an app developer’s business.

One current weakness of these mobile attribution technologies, however, is that these mobile attribution partners deliver their own version of the truth to all of its customers in the same way.

What does that mean?

Each individual business thinks of their own needs differently than the next business. Expedia wants to sell airline tickets, Nike cares about selling shoes, game developers want to sell content. They all want to sell something, but the buying patterns and the customer behaviors are very different from each other. How often do you buy an airline ticket versus a shoe versus a piece of in app content in a game?

If buying patterns from customers are all different, by extension the way budgets are allocated to entice new customers to interact with services should also be different. The time it takes for a customer who sees an Expedia ad to convert and buy an airline ticket is going to be much longer than if they were to download a game and buy content there.

Why does any of this matter?

A marketer needs to have the flexibility to see all the facts before making a decision on their attribution methodology. By using a standard methodology provided by a partner, it’s likely not situated for the custom needs that the business has.

One of the things that mobile app developers will increasingly do, is move to a system that provides facts and flexibility to build non-standard attribution methods for their channel partnerships. Look to see more of this in the future.