Hindsight’s a bitch.
That’s what we are going to be saying in the next 6-18 months.
For two decades, big tech told us a fable about attribution. That it was possible. That it was a God worth worshipping.
In truth, it was always a fishy story. Not for the hard-ass “data-driven” marketers the era produced, who are soon going to be an endangered species worthy of a David Attenborough special. But for those so-called “softies” who, often intuitively, surmised that purchase journeys for many products might be more complex than just looking at the channel that closed the deal and ascribing all value to it.
The Allure of Attribution
I understand why people bought the attribution fairytale. It is, ultimately, comforting for a species that often abhors complexity. Non-marketers, CFOs and others like things clean. But, a bit like the dismal science of economics, big tech’s self-serving attribution narrative offered a highly modelled version of reality that was, in fact, far from accurate.
New research from Scrunch should explode the old mechanisms of attribution and finally put this dying deity out to pasture.
The data shows AI’s complex impact on next steps in the buyer journey. Unsurprisingly, the road is zig zaggy, not a straight line.
A mess? Yes. But God bless this mess!
AI’s downstream impact on purchase behavior
Here’s the part of the report that caught my eye:
“Our research shows that when an AI platform recommends a brand to someone with no recent sign of using it, over the next week, that person becomes approximately:
– 182% more likely to search the brand on Google (3.28% → 9.24%)
– 117% more likely to visit the brand’s website (3.43% → 7.45%)
– 185% more likely to view it on a retailer’s product page (0.94% → 2.68%)”
The Attribution Trap reimagined
The key piece here is “over the next week.” It suggests that conventional attribution and most analytics programs are going to poorly ascribe what drives purchase. This, in turn, could lead to wrong choices around budget allocation – specifically under-investment in AI search (which data shows is alongside most buyers on complex purchase journeys through the whole funnel).
The Scrunch research has plenty of other interesting data points, and I’d encourage you to give it a close read. Hopefully, it serves as a curtain call for a bullshit narrative.
If it is not a nail in the coffin, it should at least be a shake up for lazy, unnuanced thinking.