Attribution modeling requires data on every user exposure to ads before a conversion occurs.
While such touch point records in the form of web cookies used to be readily available for many digital ads in the early days of online marketing, touch point data from traditional channels, such as TV, out-of-home, radio and print, has always been harder to access.
Beacon technology for mobile phones and TV set boxes create new opportunities to track individuals, but they require complex integrations to link lots of different identifiers into one meaningful list. While this is technically feasible, it creates extra costs and is rarely done well.
In any case, a complete user touch point recovery across competing vendors that tend to avoid supporting each other is not the only challenge for advertisers. Google is not alone in its decision to exclude cookie IDs in downloadable files in the name of privacy: Other advertising powerhouses, such as Amazon, Facebook and Twitter, don’t share any of their identifiers either.
Hence, it is fair to say that clients that leverage several of the leading online platforms will always have some key touch point data missing in their attribution models.
Nah... I'm talking about Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter pulling out their identifiers / blocks that causes the Jenga stack to crash non-holistically.
