Marketers now use attribution to better understand customers, resulting in the optimisation of their media-buy. How does it work? Attribution is the way data agencies re-create customers’ paths across multiple advertising touchpoints and allocate fair credit to channels. The objective is to highlight channels that truly incited customers into making their purchasing decision. It mainly affects businesses that have a rather complex media-mix. Yet one can easily get lost in such a new and complex field. • Reconstituting customers’ paths is a technical challenge that requires reconciling very different types of data. • Once this is done, activating the results to optimise the media-mix still demands top level statistical capabilities. Here are a few recommendations and case studies to help you get started on the topic.

2. Marketers now use attribution to better understand customers, resulting in the
optimisation of their media-buy. How does it work?
Attribution is the way data agencies re-create customers’ paths across multiple
advertising touchpoints and allocate fair credit to channels. The objective is
to highlight channels that truly incited customers into making their purchasing
decision. It mainly affects businesses that have a rather complex media-mix.
Yet one can easily get lost in such a new and complex field.
• Reconstituting customers’ paths is a technical challenge that requires reconciling
very different types of data.
• Once this is done, activating the results to optimise the media-mix still demands
top level statistical capabilities.
Here are a few recommendations and case studies to help you get started on the
topic.
Outline
I. Model choice: what’s a good attribution model?
II. From attribution to activation: how can attribution change the media-mix?
III. What’s next? Technical and organisational challenges: cross-device and on/off
IV. Case studies
Attribution
Making marketing money go where it’s most effective
i

3. Models should also include a view-through parameter, i.e. channels that involve no click (mainly
display). View-through impressions have volume and synergy effects on other channels, which is
why taking them into account is necessary.
For its part, 55’s model takes into account two main criteria:
• Past levels of performance ​of the channel​ as a function of the position in the path ­
• Opportunity level of the channel: a channel will be rewarded only if its presence is deemed
not opportunistic
I. Model choice: what’s a good attribution model?
Last click models, whereby conversion credit goes to the last touchpoint, are now being replaced
by multi-touchpoint models (MTP). These new, user level models may include linear, time decay or
U-shape variations. Still, every model is based on specific hypotheses and remains challengeable.
Attribution models
Different splits can be applied to allocate credit for one same customer path leading to a conversion
Last click
Last click non-direct
First click
Linear
Time decay
U-Shape
— — — 100%
— — 100% —
100% — — —
25% 25% 25% 25%
10% 20% 30% 40%
35% 15% 15% 35%
SEA RETARGETING DIRECT
Time
AFFILIATION
2

4. 3
Attribution is useful to evaluate campaign performance, but it becomes even more useful when
data is used to predict the optimal budget allocation across channels.
This operation, called media-mix modeling, requires to assess not only the impact of clicks and
impressions on conversion, but also the incremental cost of the click or the impression.
For instance, to evaluate the impact of a 10% increase in SEA*
spend, one needs to first figure
out its impact on CPCs**
and ad position, which in turn will give the incremental volume of clicks.
Then one may use attribution data to extrapolate the impact on conversions, given the other
touchpoints involved.
Below is a simplified schema of media-mix modeling, where the x-axis is budget evolution and
the y-axis is sales evolution.
II. From attribution to activation: how can attribution
change the media-mix?
BUDGET EVOLUTION
PREDICTED SALES EVOLUTION Channel 1
Channel 2
Channel 3
Channel 4
Channel 5
Channel 6
Channel 7
Channel 8
Channel 9
Media mix modeling
Adapting media budget for each channel of the mix according to their performance
According to the graph, if one increases Channel 4’s budget by 1%, then one can expect a 1% increase in sales.
*
SEA: Search Engine Advertising
**
CPC: Cost Per Click

5. On/off means taking into account online as well as offline interactions in attribution models.
The idea is to bring offline and online data together and establish the real ROI of media
investments.
55’s approach is to conduct ROPO analyses (Research Online, Purchase Offline) and partner with
specialists like Acxiom or Facebook Atlas to reconcile digital data with offline data.
The first step is to collect offline and online data. Once this is done, the challenge is to match
the data from offline sources with the data from online sources. Then it is possible to extrapolate
the results – therefore bringing to light the impact of online investments onto the offline world.
ROPO analyses can also be conducted the other way around (Research Online, Purchase Offline),
showing the effect of offline ads on online purchases.
Even if solving these technical challenges is the first step, organisational issues should not be
left aside: attribution raises many questions, such as how different agencies should interact, how
media performance should be monitored across channels, etc.
ii
Lastly, other methods are being developed based on apps that can hear TV sounds, QR codes,
NFC and more data links, to join up devices to TV, print and outdoor for a cross-device and cross-
channel approach.
Historically, attribution was digital only, and single browser-based. But now, data agencies are
willing to go further and integrate multi-screen browsing and offline data to their analyses. This is
why cross-device and on/off interactions are attribution’s next challenges.
When it comes to cross-device, the objective is to shift from a cookie-based approach to
a people-based one: cookies only track user activity within a given browser, which is why they
cannot be used alone to build cross-device attribution models. Today there are two main people-
based approaches to achieve cross-device tracking and/or targeting:
• The deterministic approach: on websites with a login user account system, such as social
networks, large marketplaces and some advertisers’ websites, log-in data can easily provide
a way to recreate users’ cross-device paths, as visitors log into their account across devices.
Ex: Amazon, Facebook...
• The probabilistic approach: this method uses geolocation and customers’ surfing habits
to calculate a fingerprint for each user, therefore providing the ability to infer who is using
which device and to link several devices to a unique user. Ex: Drawbridge
III. What’s next? Technical and organisational
challenges: cross-device and on/off
ii
4

6. IV. Case studies
fifty-five worked with several brands on the topic of attribution, helping them to better allocate
their marketing budget on the most efficient channels, and designing online to offline strategies
so as to bring prospects targeted online to purchase in-store.
5
As a famous French restaurant chain started buying digital media for the first time, they wanted
to be able to precisely measure the number of additional in-store visits brought about by digital
campaigns. fifty-five helped them design a pilot campaign to recruit new clients in restaurants
combining six complementary channels, including Facebook, RadiumOne and Waze, with a drive-
to-store approach.
To determine how many conversions had been the result of the online-to-offline pilot campaign,
our data scientists worked with our media experts combining cross-channel insights from the
platforms used and a statistic model designed to exclude the effect of external factors. They
were able to measure that the three-month campaign led to a 2.4% traffic increase in restaurants,
resulting in over 4,000 additional clients as a whole.
How did a famous French restaurant chain use online-to-offline marketing to increase the
number of clients in restaurants?
A major entertainment resort contacted fifty-five to help them monitor their acquisition strategy
across countries, and challenge their media-buy strategy. Historically, the client has been working
with several agencies managing different channels (display, search, etc.), with few communication
between them. Media-buy optimisation was made in silo.
fifty-five helped the client build a unified vision of their multi-channel campaigns, particularly by
reconciling ad-centric and site-centric data with a customer-centric approach, and showcasing all
data in a unique dashboard.
fifty-five enabled the client shift from a last click attribution model - whereby all conversion
credit goes to the last touchpoint - to a poly-attributive model that more accurately reflects the
quantitative and qualitative contributions of each channel.
How did a major entertainment resort optimise media acquisition and performance
monitoring thanks to a better attribution model?
Measure the impact of digital
investments on offline conversions

7. fifty-five helps brands leverage their data to increase marketing, advertising, and sales effecti-
veness. We help businesses collect, enrich, and activate their data to find new customers, foster
engagement, increase conversion, and drive sales across online and offline channels. We work
with our clients to achieve these goals using a combination of consulting, software, and mana-
ged services. Co-founded by former Google executives, fifty-five has offices in Paris, London and
Hong Kong.
fifty-five proprietarywww.fifty-five.com | contact@fifty-five.com | Paris • London • Hong Kong
B&B Hotels is a multinational hotel chain that manages over 320 hotels across 6 countries.
The hotel chain expanded their digital strategy to include mobile advertising in order to cater
for users increasingly searching for hotels on their mobile devices. Yet, current consumer
behaviour favours completing transactions on desktop devices. Therefore, B&B Hotels lacked the
confidence to further invest in mobile advertising without a clear understanding of customers’
paths across devices. Using Adwords’s latest features and an in-house statistical model, fifty-five
was able to attribute credit to multiple devices and channels, thus precisely assessing the impact
of mobile advertising.
Based on fifty-five’s recommendations, B&B Hotels transferred 17% of desktop advertising
expenditure to mobile and optimised mobile ads using Call Ad extensions, resulting in a 35%
increase in mobile conversions and a 20% rise in Return on Advertising Spending.
→ Read the complete case study
How did B&B Hotels measure the impact of mobile advertising and decide
to reallocate 17% of its SEA budget from desktop to mobile?
A French retailer specialised in home and garden decoration bought a TV campaign for the first
time, and wanted to measure the impact of this offline campaign on its e-commerce website’s
key performance indicators. Using a combination of website tracking, media-planning data and
a technology to detect TV spots, fifty-five data scientists then built an econometric model based
on several months of data history. The model took into account seasonality and other external
effects to neutralise them, and precisely assess the effect of the TV ad campaign on online
indicators such as traffic, the number of transactions and turnover.
They were able to measure that the 3-month TV campaign led to a 27% increment in website
traffic and a 5.2% increment in the volume of transactions.
How did a French retailer measure the impact of a TV campaign on its website traffic
and online conversions?
Measure the impact of TV advertising
on online traffic and conversions