A Macro Overcorrection to Short Term Observability
70% of global marketers had planned to increase their performance marketing and reduce their brand building spend in 2024 as fears of economic uncertainty caused a prioritization shift from long term strategy to short term trackable actions according to the Nielsen Global Annual Marketer Survey¹. We have observed that the necessity to prove Return on Ad Spend on all media has resulted in activation shifts away from efficacy to observability and efficiency, and the prioritization of advertising to count results rather than drive results. This financial pressure has led to reliance among many marketers to use methods like last click attribution to measure performance campaigns. However, as 2024 has developed, a change of tide in measurement strategy has started to occur, as 74.5% of marketers are either removing away from last-click attribution or would like to do so according to eMarketer study commissioned by Snap.⁷
Why We Advertise
Think about your brand’s mission statement, values, product attributes and qualities. Are these reflected in your ads? Great ads resonate and invoke emotions, demonstrate product and brand value, invite attention and are memorable. For advertisers, making sure the value of your product and brand is conveyed and understood by your core consumer is paramount. But ads that convey brand value need not always do well when certain measurement solutions like last click attribution are used, which may cause an overinvestment in non-brand building ad formats. This is even more evident among younger audiences, as they also generally shop much differently than your web analytics KPIs may indicate. According to emarketer study, 72% of marketers agree that last-click tends to ignore the upper-funnel journey (including on social, through creators, etc).⁷
Last Click Is Not Aligned With How Shoppers Actually Shop
Snapchat reaches 90% of the 13- to 24-year old population and 75% of the 13-to 34-year-old population in more than 25 counties², representing a huge audience of GenZ and Millennials consumers. Both GenZ and Millennials have a ton of spending power, however, how and where they purchase have evolved in the past few years as they engage across multiple devices and channels. The path to purchase is no longer linear and last-click attribution can not stitch together their non-linear paths to purchase accurately. For example, TransUnion leveraged their MTA product to perform a meta analysis across 17 brands and found that 89-96% of the incremental value of non-paid search channels were from view-based conversions.³
The Snapchat audience also embraces shopping apps quickly, and prefer omnichannel purchase experiences in store. Per LEK, nearly two-thirds of Gen Z prefer in-store shopping to online⁵. Last click attribution has gaps in tracking emerging and cross device shopping methods as well as in-store purchases.
Better Measurement Properly Conveys Short and Long Term Impact
Lower funnel direct response advertising typically performs better within last click attribution measurement. However, when leveraging more holistic measurement solutions such as Marketing Mix Modeling, advertisers can better capture the impact of both short and long term marketing activities. When TransUnion looked at MMM outcomes for Commerce advertisers within Snapchat, they found that brand ads outperformed DR ads at driving MMM ROI – and that the combination of brand and DR was even stronger than either alone.⁶
2023 MMM meta analysis of 12 Commerce Advertisers by TransUnion (Neustar), commissioned by Snap Inc.
Snap believes in the mastery of the three E’s framework for measurement and optimization - Execution, Experimentation and Evaluation. Marketing Mix Models and experimentation solutions are examples of measurement solutions within these tiers that all assist with better evaluating the holistic impact of your media. These tiers provide insights at various levels of scope, speed and complexity and prevent dependency on only one type of measurement like Last Click that is limiting to only the tip of the observable iceberg marketers can track Learn more about the three E’s here.