A restaurant puts up a billboard for all-day pancakes across from a restaurant that serves pancakes until 11 a.m. The billboard shows the restaurant’s name, but not its address. This restaurant asks this survey question on bills: “How did you find us?” A majority of diners who order pancakes after 11 a.m. respond, “Google.” Does the restaurant get greater return from the billboard or from Google optimization?

This little thought exercise illustrates a marketing model known as attribution. Increasingly, in digital marketing, reliance on last-click attribution is being targeted as a problem area. Wendi Dunlap, director of Global Agency Partnerships at Oracle Marketing Cloud, explained, “Last click attribution is easy; it’s simple.”

However, Dunlap told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during BigDataNYC 2016 that this linear approach doesn’t reflect reality; a consumer’s path to purchase is often circular or crisscrossed.

“When you start talking about multi-click attribution and marketing mixed-modelling, the conversation becomes a lot more nuanced,” she said.

Pieces of the purchase puzzle

Dunlap said that different factions of marketing and advertising are now lacing together to provide a more complete picture of how consumers arrive at a given destination.

“The lines are blurring between consultancies and agencies,” she said, adding that they each bring crucial bits of information to the table — particularly agencies. “They’re the single entity that has that end-to-end consumer view. No other organization has that,”she said.

Psycho data analysis

She explained that a customer relationship management tool, which is built into the Oracle Marketing Cloud, lets businesses see well beyond that often superficial last click.

“When we think about martech [the blending of marketing and technology], that’s really where we’re getting into identity and the fidelity of getting down to that single user ID.”

In other words, let’s stop giving Google all the credit.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataNYC 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE