Branch is excited to announce the availability of Attribution Model, the mobile industry’s first attribution platform for marketers and product managers to effectively attribute conversions across web and apps—no matter how complex the user journey.
Earlier this year, the Internet Advertising Bureau declared 2017 the year of attribution, as the subject is top-of-mind for companies across all industries. Branch has long provided the leading mobile linking technology to help brands build consistent user experiences across channels and platforms. Used by over 30,000 brands across the globe, Branch has identified the most significant problem facing attribution today, the inherently fragmented user journey across many browsers and apps that lacks any unifying identity. It boils down to the facts that:
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- People have many devices, including desktops, mobile phones, and tablets.
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- People use multiple browsers across these devices, resulting in multiple cookies on the same device.
- People may visit a website, but then complete a purchase in the app, and vice versa.
Given the fragmentation of cookies across different browsers, there’s no way to uniquely identify a given user unless he or she registers and signs in everywhere—a rare feat to which we as users ourselves can attest. Because the digital identity is fragmented, the following consequences occur:
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- A person is treated as many unique people, even on a single device.
- A significant amount of marketing or product driven conversions are inaccurately attributed to direct or organic sources.
Here’s a tangible look at this fragmentation in action: Imagine your social team promotes a link to a deal on Facebook. A new potential customer clicks on this link from his or her Facebook feed, and visits the site in the Facebook in-app browser and does nothing. A few days later, he or she installs the app on the same device and converts. With the legacy cookie-based attribution model, this purchase event would be attributed as an organic in-app purchase, not as a paid click and purchase from the Facebook ad. The same disconnection is happening all over the mobile ecosystem: across devices, marketing channels, and platforms. This means brands are making incorrect decisions based on inaccurate measurement data due to the technical limitations of existing attribution tools.
Distributing credit for a purchase across email, social, push notifications, ads, and other efforts is an exercise in futility. Plus, brands fundamentally don’t have the data to bridge the gap between the silos.
Now for the good news—enter Branch’s Attribution Model.
As the leader in mobile deep linking, Branch has been unifying these silos since its inception. With over 30,000 mobile apps actively using Branch links, we have reached the scale and now can see nearly every smartphone globally across our network on a monthly basis. This has enabled us to build a deterministic identify graph that enables Branch to conclude on questions such as “whether two events tied to two different browser cookies are actually from the same user”, even if the events occur in vastly different contexts within different cookie spaces.
As the previous example has shown, a significant chunk of brands’ direct and organic campaigns have been inaccurately measured. Once deployed, Branch’s Attribution Model will reveal the true digital journey of your users. To that end, Branch also provides a powerful dashboard so that you can finally answer such questions as, “Who gets credit for this revenue?” and “Which search keyword drove this user to visit our mobile site, then install our app, and then convert?”
If you would prefer to feed the Branch-tagged data into your own warehouse or product analytics tool, Branch’s Data Integrations make it extremely easy to pipe the data out to the tool of your choosing.
Your users are people, not cookies. With Branch’s Attribution Model, you can treat them as such. Try Attribution Model today.