Around 75% to 81% of companies use some form of attribution model to measure campaign performance, but only 18% of those implementations are considered highly accurate by marketers (OmniBound). Interestingly, 41% of marketers still rely primarily on legacy single-touch, such as last-click/last-touch, methods.
Why does that matter? Because without spoiling all the fun now and giving everything away, attribution is a single measurement methodology, and unified marketing analytics is the broader measurement system that can contain attribution and other data and methods.
With 41% of marketers still relying primarily on legacy single-touch methods such as last-click or last-touch, there is clearly room for more advanced approaches. Food for thought, but let’s get into the difference between unified marketing analytics and marketing attribution.
What’s Unified Marketing Analytics?
Unified marketing analytics pulls together multiple marketing data sources and various measurement methods and puts them into one view. It’s so much more efficient than treating each platform or channel separately. Unified marketing analytics can include:
Google actually gave it the definition as the approach to harmonizing MMM, MTA, and incrementality into a consolidated measurement system.
One of the core ideas of a unified approach is triangulation. Attribution tells you about the customer journey and conversion credit. MMM measures cross-channel contribution and budget effects. Incrementality tests whether advertising actually caused additional conversions or revenue or if they would have just happened anyway.
No single method answers every marketing question reliably, which is why a unified approach works so well.
Unified measurement is particularly useful for cross-channel and full-funnel marketing. That includes the difficult channels to track at the user level, such as TV, CTV, offline media, and some privacy-restricted digital activity.
What’s Marketing Attribution?
Marketing attribution gives credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoint it came from. For example, a typical customer journey could go from paid social to organic search to email to paid search before purchasing. Attribution determines how much conversion credit each interaction receives.
Attribution models range from the following:
And there’s a big difference between platforms that only focus on last-click or last-touch models and platforms like AppsFlyer that use a multi-touch model. It’s a much more rounded approach that looks at the entire journey, similar to unified marketing.
Modern data-driven attribution platforms now use AI to find the right signals to drive growth with AI-ready data infrastructure and mobile-grade measurement across channels for both converting and non-converting journeys.
Attribution’s biggest strength is speed and granularity. Marketers need to optimize campaigns, keywords, audiences, and channels relatively quickly, and attribution helps that happen.
What’s the Difference Between Unified Marketing Analytics and Marketing Attribution?
The easiest way we can put it is that attribution is more focused on one measurement methodology, and unified marketing is a bigger ecosystem of data and methods, as we said in the introduction.
Attribution is more focused on the journey and touchpoint. It distributes conversion credit across marketing interactions, and unified analytics takes a business-wide view. The point of a unified approach is to combine those journey signals with aggregated channel performance, spend, revenue, experiments, and potentially CRM/offline information.
A stand-out difference is also the questions they answer:
Is Unified Marketing or Marketing Attribution Better for ROAS and Growth?
A platform that does it all is the best, like AppsFlyer’s mobile and attribution platform and a unified marketing analytics solution.
That said, if we’re looking at single-touch attribution platforms for overall return on ad spend and long-term growth decisions, unified measurement is the one. Again, that’s why a platform like AppsFlyer, which combines the two, is better.
Unified measurement distinguishes attributed revenue from genuinely incremental revenue and assesses channels that attribution may undervalue. What you get from that is a better basis for deciding where the next dollar needs to go in terms of ad spend.
That said, single-touch attribution is still extremely useful for day-to-day optimization. If you need information that helps you decide which campaign, keyword, creative, or audience is performing today, attribution will give you so much more speed and granularity than a traditional MMM.
The best answer isn’t that unified analytics replaces attribution. Attribution should feed into a unified approach alongside MMM and incrementality, which, again, is what AppsFlyer does.
If either is used right, the Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates that improvements to advanced measurement could help unlock $26.3 billion in media investment and $6.2 billion in productivity value over 12 to 24 months.
The difference between the two is the scope and the benefit of return on ad spend and business growth. In our opinion, we’d go with a marketing attribution platform that combines unified analytics over one that’s more focused on one or the other.
