Quandary of an ad tech company: The last click issue
The ad tech industry thrives on market players that deliver transparent, professional, and above all, valuable solutions for advertisers. So it’s disappointing to see the industry being marred by accusations of unethical practices that have come to attention in the past weeks — accusations such as inflating click through rate (CTR), driving invalid clicks and capturing the last click through practices such as gaming analytics data, overwriting source codes or cookie-stuffing user computers using malware to manipulate the cookie.
It is likely that these practices unfortunately are borne out of advertisers’ decision to attribute everything they do to the last click, which may have driven some ad tech companies to succumb to this last-click obsession in various manners to keep advertisers’ business.
Last-click: Last choice?
The struggle for advertisers to measure and attribute success properly is real. For simplicity’s sake, most resort to a basic model of last-click attribution, which works like this:
Imagine a hungry user sees a YouTube ad for McDonald’s, and they think, “Oh, I would love a Filet-O-Fish”. They go to their phone and search for the nearest McDonald’s. The GPS location is given to them through a search ad, and off they go to find the store. The store window displays another ad that says: ‘10% off Filet-O-Fish, special store promo.’ The user buys the Filet-O-Fish with the promo. What happens? The store will attribute the sale to the promo, but the promo simply pushed the user over the line. They quite clearly already had the intention to buy the Filet-O-Fish burger. The first two media interactions with the YouTube ad and search ad helped to drive the business, and yet in last-click attribution, only the store promo gets the credit.
So, last-click attribution is the process of attributing all of your sales to the last media interaction that a user had before purchasing.Last-click ignores the media that introduces the user to, or the media that engages the user with, the brand. It means only recognising the media that facilitates the sale, and yet the sale would never have existed unless the user was introduced to the brand and engaged in some way to begin with.
Complex path to purchase deserves better model
The fact is, on average a user will see or touch at least 20 media points in their path to purchase, be it display, search, social, email, ambient, out-of-home, or television.Let’s face it, brands are everywhere. So a last-click model is actually an unfair approach that stifles advertisers’reach and frequency with new users, as the media that introduces a user to a brand and drives engagement with that brand need not be the media to convert the user.
This has been a problem for brands for as long as I can remember. The key to overcoming the last-click barrier is for advertisers to invest in building up their internal skill sets and technical infrastructure to better visualise the path to conversion and the media’s interactions. Unfortunately, in reality, this investment may be restricted by resources, time, or resistance to change within the organisation. At the same time, this investment is urgent and essential because, otherwise, advertisers risk settling for convenience and resorting to the easiest (but often not the most accurate or effective)attribution model—the lastclick.
This obsession with the last click has had a terrible and shocking effect on our industry. We are an ad tech company with a mission to continuously innovate a personalised media platform that our clients can trust—not only to provide them value, but especially to play by the rules. Our modus operandi is to develop technology that will give our marketing partners value at every stage of the customer lifecycle, as opposed to investing our development dollars into finding ways to win the last click.
In the face of tough competition, ad tech companies like ourselves are confronted with a dilemma. Do we soldier on down the longer, more arduous path of building advertising solutions that solve real business problems, or adopt a can’t-beat-them-join-them attitude to quickly win the last click and gain in the short-term?
Personally I would like to deliver a tangible value, not a falsified report.
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