Why Digital Marketing Attribution Is Getting Harder in the Age of AI Search
Digital marketers have long been trying to solve a rather obvious task: where did this customer come from? Once upon a time, it seemed like an obvious question. One clicked an ad on Google, visited a website, filled out a form, and finally became a customer. Someone else found a business on social media or via organic search results. Analytics tools helped track many of such actions and understand how it worked. However, this image gets harder and harder to keep. Search is changing, and people no longer use a predictable sequence of actions starting with a search query and ending up on a website. They can ask an AI service for some recommendations, read the answer without any clicks, look for a company separately, view their ratings, watch a video, and only after all of that visit the website. When this person becomes a lead or a customer, it will be quite hard to determine the source of the influence. Here is a new task for digital marketers: how do you measure the efficiency of marketing when the customer journey is unpredictable? Attribution Was Never as Simple as It Looked Digital marketing attribution can be described as a system to identify what marketing actions led to a conversion. Think of a customer who comes across a business via an Instagram ad. After a couple of days, the customer does some searches on Google. Two blogs later, the customer leaves the website, returns after a week via an organic search link, and submits an inquiry. Whose credit is it? Based on last-click attribution, it may go to the organic search since it was the last point of contact before the customer converted. The first-click attribution model will give the credit to Instagram. Multi-touch will attribute the credit to multiple points. All the above models could be correct since they just look at the customer journey from different perspectives. Now imagine adding AI to the customer journey. This will especially be critical for a digital marketing agency since more clients are interested in knowing the origin of their leads as well as how their customers find them. A Customer Can Be Influenced Without Clicking One of the main differences that AI-driven search introduces is that not all interactions lead to visiting the website. Imagine someone who wants to purchase accounting software. This person asks an AI search engine which platforms are appropriate for use by a small business. Several brands are recommended. But the person doesn’t click on any link, as he or she only researches the product. Two days later, this person searches for one of those brands on Google. This person reads various reviews, visits the website, compares prices, and finally asks for a demo. If you look at the report only, then the conversion looks like a result of branded organic search. But maybe the brand became known to the person due to an AI search? It cannot be said that AI made the person buy the product, but it might have influenced his or her decision in some way. The Number of Discovery Channels Is Growing The use of artificial intelligence search is not a replacement for all of the current marketing channels. Instead, it is yet another addition to a growing list of choices that may present a potential customer with a brand name. This may happen via Google Search, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, review sites, industry publications, forums, emails, ad channels, or an AI-powered channel. There may be some overlap between the channels used. The buyer does not care about attribution models. They simply accumulate information until they feel ready to make a decision. But marketers do have to deal with the numbers. That is why the traditional question, “Which channel converted the buyer?” does not always give the complete picture. “What was the buyer’s journey before conversion?” would be a much more relevant one. Zero-Click Searches Make the Picture Even Less Clear A number of opinions have been expressed about zero-click searches, while AI search adds another aspect to the problem. A person can receive a relevant answer without going to the site. For the website owner, such a situation looks quite contradictory: a person found something helpful on his site but still has no visits registered by Google Analytics. However, it doesn’t mean that the site did not benefit from being recognized. Brand awareness can be formed without a direct visit. A person can remember a brand name, share it with a colleague, search later, or even purchase from the site later. AI Search Has Added Another Layer to the Customer Journey Classic searches followed a predictable flow of events. One had a query, typed it into a search engine, scanned the results, clicked on a website, and then continued researching on that page. AI-based search will turn it into a different story. For example, one could ask a search assistant a specific question and get an answer compiled from several sources. The customer might find out what needs to be found out based on the answer received and not have to click on any of the websites just yet. At some point, he or she may perform a search for one of the companies from the answer received previously. It would be another isolated search in analytics reports. And this is where attribution becomes complicated. The first AI-powered search could contribute to the awareness creation process, but the visit to the website could be attributed to a different traffic channel altogether. AI Citations Are Measurable, but They Don’t Tell the Whole Story There is definitely one part of AI-related traffic that can be measured more precisely. In some cases, AI searches return links to other websites, and people click on them. As OpenAI claims, for instance, publishers have the ability to get referral traffic from ChatGPT with utm_source=chatgpt.com used for referrals. It gives the marketer something to track. If a user visits the site via ChatGPT, it is possible to detect the
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