Page 62 - The European Business Review

Marketing

Consumers respond more favourably to fewer to online advertising channels – to the channel where the
consumer makes the purchase decision. However, this is a
more consistent banner designs over multiple
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different pages rather than a large quantity of all touch points except the last one in the purchase funnel
differing adverts on a smaller number of pages. and so does not capture the full value of digital advertising.
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management related technologies, measuring the success of
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that brand or company. What’s more, they argue that focussing culty in attributing the value of online investment to various
on click-through rates may be the wrong gauge for managers online channels. Moreover, the problem with rule-based
to use as their research shows that simple exposure to a banner or heuristic attribution models such as last-click is that not
advert will increase the likelihood of a current consumer only is it impossible to predict (on an individual basis) the
engaging in repeat purchasing, and the fact that they haven’t ways customers across multiple backgrounds, preferences,
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conducted is that consumers respond more favourably to fewer to their individual contributions. In making these alloca-
more consistent banner designs over multiple different pages tions, one has to contend with different digital channels (e.g.
rather than a large quantity of differing adverts on a smaller Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, search, blogs, email
number of pages. It is likely that high-involvement products and display advertising): it thus becomes too complicated
that the consumers only purchase after long careful consider- to develop an attribution model for each and every path to
ation, such as a car or van, gain the best results via click-through purchase – a customer may use one or more of these chan-
responses to advertising, conversely low-involvement products nels before making a purchase decision. Consequently, there
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or a high number of consumers simply viewing the advert. based attribution models as a preferable attribution strategy.
In a purchase funnel, a consumer may interact with an These models can provide more stable credit assignments to
assortment of media platforms ranging from paid search and the digital channels in purchase funnel.
organic search to social media and email. Exhibit 1 depicts In a paper on “Attribution Modeling in Digital Advertising:
how a consumer may rely on display ad as a sole informa- An Empirical Investigation of the Impact of Digital Sales
2
tion outlet when making a purchase decision (Sales Funnel 1). Channels”, we describe and compare different statistics-
Alternatively, he or she may use several other media channels based and rule-based attribution models. The paper shows,
including search, social media and price comparison (Sales under what conditions, display ads or search or organic are
Funnel 2). For many companies, digital advertising has thus a good media strategy. Our goal in this paper is to test all
become a vital way to maintain the premium pricing of their these models empirically; in terms of how they assign value
brands, which means that the problem is not simply about the to different online channels when moving away from the last-
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nies invariably use the last-click method to assign credit display), we also explain whether multi-channel attribution

Exhibit 1: Examples of Digital Channels Used in a Sales Funnel
Digital Channels

Sales Funnel 1 Display Ad Purchase

Price
Sales Funnel 2 Display Ad Search Social Media Purchase
Competition

Source: Nisar & Yeung (2017)

62 The European Business Review January - February 2018