Over 400 brands attended Rakuten Marketing’s annual Symposium conference, earlier this month, to debate hot industry topics and share insights on how to grow their businesses in the cost per action (CPA) sector.
Top of the agenda was attribution, fuelled by a keynote from digital measurement expert Seth Richardson, CEO of DC Storm.
Richardson said: “Last click wins doesn’t work anymore – the game has changed because the consumer’s purchase journey has become so fragmented.
“Publishers are credited five times more when they move to an attribution model. It’s time to start rewarding those publishers whose role in the buying decision has previously been overlooked and for there to transparency about which publishers are really driving brands’ sales.”
Here are some more sound bites from the event, which took place in London on 3 April 2014:
Christine Fitzgerald, head of commercial for ShopStyle by PopSugar, said: “For many content publishers, it’s difficult to benefit from last click, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been a part of the shopper’s purchasing decision.
“We need to see change so that advertisers reward the influence that every touch point has, not just the last one.”
James Little, commercial director at Top CashBack, commented: “I believe that last click wins will be the ongoing model in this industry – attribution has been talked about for ten years and I’m not convinced that it will become a payment mechanism for more than a handful of merchants, especially as entire businesses have been built around it.
“What I would say is that the recent availability of more data and insights is a wonderful thing and I think it will be crucial that publishers continue to become destination sites for consumers in order to drive conversions.”
Mark Haviland, managing director of Rakuten Marketing Europe, added: “The last click model has been hugely successful for many organisations, but with access to more data retailers now have the chance to contrast it with other theories.
“Our annual Symposium is a fantastic event to encourage this industry debate and at Rakuten Marketing we are facilitating these discussions to build our customers’ knowledge of the attribution models available.”
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