Making better decisions: Attribution Modeling comes to DFA

Attribution modeling, even with the Path to Conversion report, can be a daunting task, with the data inputs required and the approaches varying greatly depending on one’s level of experience. Countless hours can be spent manipulating and setting up data before you can even think about gleaning insights on your campaign.

Last week we first introduced the Attribution Modeling Tool, and today we’re pleased to announce its availability to all DFA users. No additional setup is necessary to get started, since the modeling data is pulled from your advertising campaigns running in DFA.

The Attribution Modeling Tool, accessible from within Multi-Channel Funnels, includes six standard models plus the ability to create custom models:

1. Floodlight, the standard DFA model, is based on a last-click wins model which gives 100% of credit to the last click, or to the last impression if no click is present in the path. It’s useful as a baseline for comparison with other models. 
2. Last Interaction gives the last touch point 100% of the credit for the conversion. 
3. First Interaction gives the first touch point 100% of the credit for the conversion. It can help you understand which campaigns create initial awareness for your brand or product. 
4. Linear gives each touch point in the conversion path equal credit for the conversion. An advertiser might use this model if campaigns are designed to maintain contact and awareness with the customer throughout the entire sales cycle. 
5. Time Decay gives most of the credit to touch points that were closest in time to the sale or conversion. It can be useful for campaigns with short sales cycles, such as promotions. 
6. With Position Based, 40% credit is assigned to the first interaction, 20% credit is assigned to the middle interactions, and 40% credit is assigned to the last interaction. It can be used to adjust credit for different parts of the customer journey, such as early interactions that create awareness and late interactions that close sales. 

You can further answer specific questions by creating custom models with rules based on interaction type, position, time, DFA data (site, placement, etc.), and DoubleClick Search data (campaign). This lets you adapt the models to better account for your campaign objectives.

So start exploring different attribution models with the data in your DFA campaigns. You’ll learn how to quickly build, customize, and compare models and derive new insights on the customer journey to conversion from the different touch points of your campaign.

Attribution modeling is just one area where clients will benefit from a single view of the customer via the unified platform, DoubleClick Digital Marketing. To learn more about what you can do with attribution in DFA, reference these articles in the DFA Help Center (sign-in required).

Posted by Bill Kee, Product Manager

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Join us at IAB MIXX in NYC, Oct 1-2

There’s been some buzz in the industry this week around our big bets in display advertising and digital marketing technology, with coverage in Forbes of the progress made on DoubleClick Digital Marketing and articles in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times about recent eMarketer predictions of Google’s future in display. As Neal Mohan, VP of Display Advertising at Google, told The Wall Street Journal, "We're seeing strong growth in our brand business. Measurement and creative formats are top of mind for clients these days."

On the heels of this coverage, Neal will be going deeper into these topics with a keynote at the IAB MIXX conference in New York City on Oct 2. He will be joined on-stage by Jon Suarez-Davis, Kellogg’s Senior Director of Global Digital Strategy, and Curt Hecht, Global Chief Revenue Officer at The Weather Channel, who will be representing the advertiser and publisher sides in a lively debate about programmatic buying and brand-building online. Be sure to check it out!

When the Irresistible Force of Technology Meets the Immovable Object of Brand - Paradox, Big Bang or Non-Start?
How the Science of Automation plays into the Art of Brand Building
Tuesday, Oct 2, 3:15-3:45pm

When it first emerged, programmatic buying promised to transform how digital media was bought and sold. Its ability to deliver precise connections, scale, and efficiency attracted performance marketers, but the value to brand campaigns was less clear.  As technologies evolve to better target and engage audiences and measure campaign effectiveness, brands are beginning to funnel dollars into online spend and embrace the programmatic trend. However, some publishers equate programmatic with the loss of advertiser connections and the death of premium inventory. This leaves the industry to confront key questions: Can the whole industry benefit from this transformation? How should publishers and advertisers work together in this new world order? Neal Mohan, VP of Display Advertising at Google, will explore these tensions with senior brand marketers and their publishing partners, taking this debate out of back rooms and onto the big stage.

Posted by Emily Wright, Product Marketing Manager

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Constantly innovating: the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform

Earlier this summer we announced we were bringing together DoubleClick’s advertising technology products into the DoubleClick Digital Marketing (DDM) platform for advertisers and agencies.  

Over the coming months we’ll be giving you regular updates on this journey as we launch upgrades of the DoubleClick products, implement cross-product integrations, and deliver innovative, new features within the individual products.

We’ve had a busy summer, and are excited to share the following details:

• Platforms upgrades -  An important first step to delivering on the vision of DDM is upgrading the individual DoubleClick products to take advantage of Google’s technology. Today we’re highlighting the progress we’ve made upgrading two platforms: DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Studio.

DoubleClick Bid Manager -- Google acquired the Invite Media demand-side platform in 2010, and since then we have completely rebuilt the platform.  We announced during the summer that Bid Manager was going into beta and now, with a notable volume of traffic flowing through the system, we’ll be making this new version available to all customers in October.  Customers using the new Bid Manager to target, optimize, and buy display media have seen improved performance, including seeing 16% more inventory due to infrastructure improvements that reduce our latency with exchanges.

DoubleClick Studio version 2 -- We have also upgraded our rich media production tool, DoubleClick Studio, which facilitates a streamlined workflow between media and creative agencies for the web’s most engaging ad formats. Almost 80% of creative agencies using DoubleClick Studio have already transitioned to the new version, which delivers a faster and more responsive UI and integrated dynamic content capabilities.

Upgrading the individual platforms also gives us the opportunity to make sure that they work better together to unlock even more opportunities for our customers.

• Streamlining cross-product interactions:  When we asked leading agencies and advertisers how much time their staff could save by working in an integrated ad platform, they estimated they could save about a third of hours spent per week -- or about an extra month every year each team member could invest in other activities -- just by reducing manual processes and working in a single system.

With the DoubleClick Bid Manager upgrade and its integration with DDM, buyers can now access cross-channel opportunities that are only available through a unified system.  For example,  we’re excited to announce the ability for agencies and marketers using DoubleClick Search to show consumers display ads via DoubleClick Bid Manager based on their interactions with paid search ads. Marketers have struggled to coordinate their search and display marketing efforts, and this new integration makes it easier, with no new site tags and no new products to learn.  

Another subtle step toward cross-product interaction is the rollout this week of a new universal navigation bar and application switcher for users of DoubleClick Search, DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick Studio. While a simple change, we believe this new UI will facilitate seamless switching between DoubleClick products, saving time for marketers who are using our platform to manage their campaigns across multiple channels.   

• Innovation across the platform:  In addition to integrating our platforms, we are continuing to invest in our existing products.  As an example of this, we’re excited to announce the launch later this month of Attribution Modeling in Multi-Channel Funnels in DoubleClick for Advertisers.

Advertisers use a variety of channels, messages and ads to engage customers. Determining which of these efforts is most effective in converting customers can be difficult (see related post here).  Attribution analysis can help identify what is driving customers, but until recently it’s only been practical for the most sophisticated advertisers.  By the end of September, we’re making attribution modeling available to anyone using DFA -- for free.

Some benefits of this approach include:

1. Ready to use data -- the attribution modeling data will live within DFA, so there’s no delay between when you want to run an analysis, and when you can actually start.
2. Flexible, customizable, transparent models -- you can take advantage of five standard attribution models in DFA, or build your own custom model tailored to the needs of your business
3. It’s free -- no need to build your own system for this kind of analysis. We’re giving it to you as part of DFA, with your data loaded and ready to go.

We're rapidly delivering on our vision for a fully integrated experience and common workflows across DoubleClick solutions -- from ad serving to buying and analytics.  We’re excited to be on this journey with our customers and believe that by delivering an integrated experience, we can help the industry truly unlock the full potential of digital marketing. Stay tuned for more updates, there’s a lot more to come!

Posted by: Jason Miller

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Need help? Now you can get it right inside the DFA UI

We've made it easier to get right from DFA to the help you need. In fact, you don't even have to leave DFA at all: now you can access a help pane from within the DFA UI. Use it to find and read articles, as well as contact the support team with questions or comments.

To open in-product help, click the Help link in the upper right of the DFA interface. This brings up a search bar you can use to find popular Help Center articles.

If you need more help, try the full Help Center by clicking Explore Help in the lower right of the product help page. Or click Contact Support to send questions to the support team.

In-product help even offers tools to accompany your question or comment with a screenshot of your page. You can highlight areas of the screenshot that are especially relevant to your issue.

Plus, your question or comment will automatically include the URL you’re on, along with key trafficking details and information about your browser type. You can review all this data before you send your message by just clicking on the Included system information link.

Help content may be a route, but we know the product is your destination. That's why we developed in-product help with this in mind: the quickest way back to DFA is never leaving in the first place. So try it out and let us know what you think.

Posted by Jeremy Axelrod, Technical Writer, DFA

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Setting lookback windows in Path to Conversion reports

Have you ever changed your Floodlight lookback window and then waited a few days in order to see how conversion numbers would change? Have you ever misconfigured your lookback windows in the trafficking UI and wished you could regenerate your conversion numbers with the correct lookback windows?

The new Path to Conversion report (P2C) available in DFA Reporting offers greater flexibility around setting and managing lookback windows when you run a report.

Example 1: I’m interested in seeing the impact on conversions if I shorten the lookback window from its original 30-day Floodlight configuration.

Select “Custom” from the new Lookback Window drop-down under Report Properties.

The “From Floodlight” option simply uses the pre-calculated lookback window value that is already applied.

Unlike Floodlight lookback windows, which are based on calendar days, custom lookback windows use a simple 24-hour calculation. A 2-day value for clicks means that the clicks will need to be within 48 hours of the conversion to count. A 0 value will effectively remove clicks or impressions from attribution eligibility.

For this report, I want to allow a 7-day window for clicks and only a 3-day window for impressions.

Once I have changed the lookback window, to understand its effects I can add any of the following dimensions to my query:

Conversion Dimensions

• Floodlight Attribution Type indicates if the conversion is a click-through or a view-through conversion using the Floodlight lookback windows.
• Recalculated Attribution Type tells me if the conversion is a click-through or view-through conversion using the 7- and 3-day lookback windows I configured under Report Properties.

Per Interaction Dimensions

• Similarly, I can compare Floodlight Attributed Interaction to Recalculated Attributed Interaction to see how attribution changed using my new lookback windows.
• Within Floodlight lookback window indicates if the interaction was already in the Floodlight lookback window or if the new lookback window brought the interaction into this conversion path.

Example 2: I am seeing a number of conversion paths with large periods of inactivity for many users. I would like to evaluate the impact on conversions using only more recent activity without changing my original lookback window.

To do this, I can select the “Max gap between interactions” option under Report Properties.

Setting a limit on the number of days will end a conversion path if the distance between two elements in the path is greater than or equal to that number of days. This is good for tidying up longer paths to focus on more recent events.

This is just one simple demonstration of the power of the Path to Conversion report. The new lookback window tools in the Path to Conversion report provide a way to analyze your conversion data with greater flexibility.

Try it today and let us know how it helps you out!

Posted by Jason Gessner, Software Engineer, DFA

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