Adwords Data Driven Attribution

One of the hardest things to do well is valuing all of your marketing activity in the right way. It is even harder to act on those valuations. With Adwords Data Driven Attribution finally launching that pain is gone now. Obviously that is more so for advertisers that depend heavily on Adwords search as their major marketing channel.

Here is the (pretty underwhelming) Adwords Blogpost from May 10th 2016.

Is Adwords Data Driven Attribution modeling for everyone?

Adwords data driven attribution is for you if you are pretty sure that their Adwords conversion tracking gives you an accurate picture of success. Or alternatively, for those that are happy to live with the Google Analytics imported goals attribution logic. With the latter logic conversions will be imported into the Adwords ecosystem only if the last non direct channel was on an Adwords ad. And that logic is in device. So it leads to undervaluation of Adwords, compared to perhaps a over valuation for conversion tracking. That logic is unaware of any other channels role in the journey, and credits the full conversion back to Adwords.

Outsmart competition on Google Search with data driven attribution

Switching on the bidding (the reporting is there already) is a huge opportunity to outsmart your competition on Google Search. You will have exactly the right bid, for every single auction you enter. Search only unfortunately, but still, cool. No more assumptions!

If you are the first one to do this in a busy Adwords auction, you should be reaping significant benefits. You need to select the Data Driven Attribution logic from the dropdown menu. It is that simple. You do that in Adwords, by going into the setting of the Conversion action. After that, you might want to gather some data before put your bidding to Target CPA. If you ask me, I would use the maximum conversion window of ninety days, so you have a lot of data to base those bids on. Theoretically, you could start bidding on any keyword in this setup. If a click does not add any value, bids will be lowered to a point where that (upper funnel) keywords starts raising the likelihood of visitors to convert.

Adwords data driven attribution is device agnostic

Last but not least, Adwords Data Driven Attribution takes customer journeys across devices into account. It uses Google’s knowledge of who owns what device, based on sign in to Gmail, Search, Maps, YouTube and Android. It means that if you click on Adwords ads on different devices that those clicks are one customer journey. So you are talking people instead of cookies.