Attribution a stumbling block for A/NZ marketers

Attribution is vital to marketing success but remains a key stumbling block for Australian marketers, while programmatic is a burgeoning area of spend, a new report has found.

The new ANZ State of the Industry report produced by ad tech vendor, AdRoll, in partnership with third-party research firm, Qualtrics, found 92 per cent of Australia and New Zealand marketers are planning for programmatic ad budgets to increase or stay the same in the coming year. Just over two-thirds (68 per cent) are spending between 10 and 50 per cent of their advertising budgets on programmatic ads.

In addition, 55 per cent claimed to be seeing greater returns through programmatic ads compared to traditional media buying.

The most popular channel for programmatic is currently social media (68 per cent), and 70 per cent of marketers are purchasing social media space programmatically.

The survey also found attribution is a key concern for local marketers, with 61 per cent asserting solving attribution as critical or very important to their success as marketers. Overall, 92 per cent believe attribution is vital to marketing success. But 41 per cent are still not sure how to implement or analyse attribution tracking.

Just on half (49 per cent) suggest the future of attribution is better multi-touch tracking, even though only 39 per cent are using this approach. Thirty-five per cent said viewability tracking was the future of attribution. Currently, 53 per cent of respondents are using first/last touch attribution as their primary digital marketing model.

Retargeting was investigated further in the report, and shown to be securing between 10 and 25 per cent of the entire online ad budget for 38 per cent of marketers surveyed. Third-one per cent intend to increase retargeting budgets over the next 12 months, with the top objective being brand awareness.

When it comes to effectiveness, 81 per cent agreed retargeting was performing well or better than alternatives when compared to other display ads, and 78 per cent agree in comparing retargeting to email. Eighty per cent also saw retargeting as performing well or better compared to search.

Just over half of B2B marketers are currently retargeting on mobile, compared to 41 per cent of B2C marketers, and over half of marketers say social media is the hottest topic in retargeting, following by email.

When it comes to how marketers measure a digital campaign’s success, total conversions was overwhelmingly the preferred metric (59 per cent), followed by ROI/return on ad spend (33 per cent), cost per action (17 per cent), clickthrough rate (15 per cent) and cost per click (14 per cent).

The report also delved into the approach to customer lifecycle, and asked marketers how they allocated budget accordingly. Across the group, just over one-third (36 per cent) was found to be allocated to prospecting for new customers, 26 per cent for converting prospective customers, 1 per cent for activating or upselling customers, and 20 per cent onretaining customers and driving loyalty.

The Adroll report was based on a survey of 265 A/NZ marketers.

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