Understanding how marketing touchpoints contribute to revenues is one of marketers’ most challenging yet vital tasks. Being able to demonstrate this contribution can turn marketing from a cost center into an investment that effectively drives market share gains for a business. Even with the rise of digital advertising, attribution has remained difficult—but more marketers continue to work on the problem.
When demand-side platform The Trade Desk polled agency and brand marketers in North America in September 2020, 84% said they were facing new pressure to prove the effectiveness of their ad spend since the onset of the pandemic.
We estimate that, by the end of this year, 84.2% of US companies with at least 100 employees will be using digital attribution models of some kind, including first- and last-touch models as well as more complex options. Some 65.3% of such companies will use multichannel attribution models (i.e., those capable of attributing credit for an outcome to more than one marketing channel or touchpoint).