Affiliate Summit Europe 2018: Achieving more effective performance attribution

What a great two days at Affiliate Summit Europe 2018. Our COO Robert Schneider and Sales Manager Felix Kleinsorge were in London to meet up with advertisers, ad networks and portals from all over the world. The crowd was energized and the discussions motivating.

Online marketing’s challenges

While the primary recurring topic of this summit seemed to be the affiliate marketers’ challenge of matching demand and supply of traffic, there were others too. For instance, it became increasingly clear that the upcoming GDPR is on everyone’s mind, as there was a GDPR clinic to advise companies on their data protection measures. Also, in our meetings with online players, we were happy to listen to their concerns and share our positioning as an independent marketing technology that empower clients such as Zalando, Ogilvy and Idealo to be in control of their performance marketing.

Checklist for fairer attribution

We also attended an intriguing roundtable hosted by Impact Radius on Measurement and Attribution.

Our beliefs were confirmed in this roundtable that for most publishers today, attribution is still a black box. All the data is analysed, configured and saved somewhere, while publishers are fully in the dark when it comes to information, such as how attribution for that advertiser works, or according to which rules – even after they have been paid!

Our takeaways from this roundtable was also nicely aligned with our previous article for the Attribution in E-Commerce series. There were three main considerations to ensure fairer attribution.

• All channels with the same rules should be tracked by your marketing technology, so that your attribution is based on a fuller picture.
• Check the proportion of customer journeys that only have a single marketing activity in it. If this is a high proportion, then your attribution rules would be worth less of your worries.
  (See: Single Activity Customer Journey)
• Check the frequency of the other marketing activities that won. How much and how often these activities are remunerated are highly dependent on your marketing strategy and how you set your attribution rules.

To do any of the above, you would need a marketing technology that helps you to gain that overview and make this analysis. This is where Ingenious Technologies comes into play.

With our independent marketing technology, we are certain that online players would be better able to benefit from tracking to the highest accuracy and gaining the control over the marketing data. With such control and overview, online players can determine whether they are placing their marketing investments smartly.

All in all, we’re happy that other players are raising awareness too about the lack of true operational attribution knowledge among online players, and look forward to serving their needs!

Thanks for the fruitful time, London!