Transcript for:
Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) vs Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)

Hello, I'm Matthias. I'm with Windsor.Ai. I'm joined by Enes, who is also from Windsor.ai. We had our customers asking us what is the difference between a MTA, a multi-touch attribution model and a marketing mix model. This question has been popping up many times. And today we will try and provide a simple answer. So let's start with MTA. Now MTA is the way you measure the different touch points. Your customers have. So let's start with touch points: As a user, before doing a purchase or a form fill on a website, I have multiple touch points. I can only have one, but let's assume I have a few. So let's say. Buying a sneaker. The first touch point I have is a display ad. I'm being targeted. The second touch point I have is being retargeted. Then I click on a display ad again. And the third touch point is I then search for the brand. And click on a brand search. So it's a branded paid search. And the last touchpoint is an organic search. So now attribution is the way you give credit to each of the touchpoints which are present. So with the first touchpoint, I would give all the credit to the first touchpoint, which was the display ad. Very simple. With the last touchpoint attribution. We give all the credit to the last touchpoint. And now I would like to expand a little bit on that now. Last touchpoint was used for a good 10 plus years during the days of GA UA because whenever you looked at GA UA Google Analytics: Universal Analytics report, you will be presented by last touch numbers and it's sub ideal. Because you're only giving credit on the last touch, meaning that you're leaving out everything which happened before, upper funnel channels, which are. Display or paid social, which are often not the closers were completely left out. Of course, it's really to the advantage of channels like Google organic or Google paid search, because that is already very intent driven. So you're very likely to convert when you search for Nike running shoe, or in my case, I like ASICs when you look for ASICs running shoes, because you're ready to buy. So that is the world until 2023, and now we go into the data driven attribution GA4. When it started, it came with the last touch attribution and now Google started switching into data driven attribution. Now we work with a known data driven model, which is called a Markov model. And a data driven model should help us to make it better decision on how we should reallocate the credits for each touchpoint. So instead of looking at it in a very simplistic fashion and give credit to the last touchpoint or the first touchpoint only, we want to get as close as possible to the real customer journey. So we look at what the historical probability is that a channel impacts an outcome, meaning in the context of performance marketing or digital analytics, we look at each touch point and try to distribute the credits based on the likelihood that the conversion is going to happen. So let's say we have. 200 converters and we have 1000 non converters. We then model the data and have the model tell us that in case we run a simulation and let's say we remove Facebook ads from all the historical conversion journeys in that simulation, what would the overall impact be to conversions? And then based on that, we give credit to each of the touchpoints based on that simulation. It's a much cleaner way. It's more complicated, but it's a cleaner way of giving credit to each touchpoint instead of a human deciding: now we give credit only to the last touchpoint, or now we give credit only to the first touchpoint. So it helps to improve decision making .Now the drawbacks are that MTA is getting harder and harder and harder because you have a lot of the wall gardens, not allowing you to, for example, impression track. I mean, Facebook ads and Google ads. So in 2023, as we record this, you can only do an MTA based on clicks. So that means you lose all the impression data because Facebook decided in 2017 that they will stop ad serving impressions. And therefore you can only work with click data. it would not make sense to use impression data on one channel and only click data on another channel because then , you will skew the whole model. So basically everyone in 2023 is using a click based approach. So that's one thing. Then the second thing is that now cookies are harder and we have cookie consent and GDPR. In order to do an MTA, you need to have users allowing your cookie banners. So everyone who clicks reject cookies, they will not be able to be tracked with an MTA. We work with companies across the globe, but there are certain markets where the probability that the user clicks no is much higher. And for example, in places like Germany, we have seen, depending on the audience that you can have up to 40% off the transactions without a trackable journey. So it's then questionable whether one can rely on such a data set to make decisions and how to reallocate budgets. Now, in light of this and the whole advance of AI, MMM is having a return. MMM Is the way of correlating spend to revenue instead of looking what touchpoints caused the revenue. I will hand over to Enes as the expert here. Thanks. Media Mix Modeling, or MMM, is a method used for tracking and measuring the overall performance of your model. You can do this by playing with different parameters and seeing how they affect the overall advertising result. For example, suppose that I run a car dealership and I have various ads across different platforms. I also have the performance of each of these platforms. I have metrics such as sales, how much I spent on each platform, the country city, et cetera, which is great, but I want something more. I want to analyze my data further. I want to set a goal. For example, I want to set a goal of selling 200 cars in the next six months. By using MMMs, I can test the model with various parameters, and I can say if I increase my spending in London by 10%, how many more cars will I sell in general, or if I increase my spending on Facebook, does that give me better results, or should I stick with Google? So it gives us the chance as managers, to see if my changes are affecting the overall performance of my marketing strategies. Some of the effects that MMMs can measure are seasonality or other external factors. In this case, let's say weather. Seasonality. So suppose that I have a ice cream shop, and I will see that throughout time I will sell more ice cream during summers than during winters. I will see that my data always peaks during summers, but during the winters, then I lose a lot of sales. MMMs can take into consideration seasonality. They can tell us, Hey, during this season, you are getting more sales. So we are not skewing and we are not causing issues with our final model prediction. Another thing that MMMs are good at is external factors. For example, we can incorporate how different parameters can affect our final result. In this case, let's say I sell umbrellas and I will see that during rainy days I am selling much more than during sunny days. In this case, I am taking into consideration an external factor, something that in other models will not be taken into consideration. So now that we know what MTA is and MMM is. The real question is when to use which and how to use these different strategies. We know that MTA is good in cases when you have granular data. It's good when you actually have impressions, likes, clicks. So you can actually analyze the journey of each user. However, as Matthias mentioned earlier, the disadvantage here is that not all the users are being tracked anymore. And other disadvantages that you can track only ads, which are online. Let's say that you are having some ads on the spheres of marketing, let's say TV, radio, and so on. You cannot track them . So the idea is that if you have data which you can use to analyze your users, such as likes impressions, you can definitely use MTAs but use it with caution. If you want to also include into your analysis a different factor, that is MMMs so in that case, you can also use them because they are good to set company goals. Let's say if you want to have a prediction for the future to estimate how each ad is affecting the overall sales performance. The advantage here is that MMMs give you something good without much of data. You don't need all these small different parameters to estimate the final model. However, the issue is that you don't know how your user is behaving. For example, you don't know which ad is actually causing more sales, which platform is causing more sales, and so on. So, use MTAs mostly if you have user based data and granular data. Use MMMs. When you want to make predictions for the future. Now last, I just wanted to mention that we have a different or another marketing strategy called unified marketing measurement, which actually incorporates both of these methods, MTAs and MMMs. The information that you lose from one platform, you can actually gain from the other one. And this is great, because you can know more about your users. However, the disadvantage is that , your analysis becomes more complex, because you need to take into consideration all these different pattern mirrors coming from different methods and strategies. So, that's all we had for this small little demo. I hope that we answered most of your questions. Back to Matthias. Thanks, Enes. Thanks very much for watching. If you do like that please subscribe and leave us a comment if there is any question, we'd be happy to answer it for you. Thanks very much.