As businesses look for new ways to measure and optimize their media performance in the privacy era, it’s important to avoid the media mix death spiral, especially when your cross-channel investment decisions are relying on Google Analytics (GA) or Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA).
The challenge is that cross-channel optimization with GA or MTA gives you extremely limited visibility into upper-funnel media performance, which can result in misallocation of budget, guiding marketers to focus disproportionately on lower-funnel activities.
Additionally, when deploying a user-level methodology, you are likely just optimizing to click paths and ending up with a media mix low in incrementality that over-indexes on high-intent consumers who would have made a purchase anyway.
Stagnating Customer Acquisition
In this short video, I call out how measuring media performance with click-based measurement solutions chokes off the lifeblood of your growth engine. If your media measurement is not calibrated for incrementality, brands tend to see over-reported numbers on lower funnel media. This drives even greater investment into the low funnel, and top-of-the funnel new customer acquisition stagnates – this is the death spiral in action.
Even before user-level attribution was broken beyond repair, MTA has always been incapable of optimizing beyond lower funnel performance marketing. This negative feedback loop results in stalled growth and ultimately contributes to business failure.
Calibrated Optimization Reporting
Marketers must calibrate cross-channel media metrics with incrementality to effectively spend and optimize across the high, mid, and low funnel, otherwise you’re at a competitive disadvantage.
But there’s hope. Watch this video to learn why you should abandon user-level attribution as your source of truth, and why the only path to stable growth is optimizing your media strategy to full funnel incrementality.