Attribution, Optimization, Allocation. Three simple steps your ad platform can do to help your company to increase the return on advertising spend.
The first step is the most difficult one: Attribution. You can collect as much stats data you want from the different channels (Facebook, Google, Email marketing.) But how do you know because your customer saw a Facebook Ad about a Nintendo Switch new game, she opened up the email promotion, and then finally went to the online store and bought the game? Do you attribute the sale to the Ad or to the email?
If you remove San Francisco from the list of cities you are advertising on because the cost of acquiring a customer is 2x the average, then you are doing an Optimization. At this point is where predictive analysis becomes handy, the “what if” part of your platform should help to give answers based on historical data.
Allocation is the easiest step. Is just that, allocate. Once you know where your customers are coming from, what’s the optimal way to reach them, you allocate money on different dimensions: devices, channels, locations.
If you are building an ad analytics platform, focus on step #2: Optimization. On making the predictions and simulations that are more meaningful to your business. No agency, or a third-party tool, will focus and work on the specific problems of your business than you. They are busy solving the attribution and allocation problems.
