From clicks to clarity: Media Mix Modelling Q&A with Acquire

How is the way your clients measure marketing performance evolving beyond last-click attribution?

“Last-click attribution is still useful day to day – it gives teams something concrete to act on. But it has a real blind spot: it rewards whoever was closest to the sale, not necessarily whoever earned it.

“In some cases, click-based measurement is missing up to 90%+ of the impact from channels like TikTok, Meta and Demand Gen. So investment naturally gets skewed towards what’s easiest to measure, not what actually drives growth.

“At Acquire, we’ve seen clients shift towards full-funnel measurement – particularly MMM – which looks at the entire journey from impressions through to conversion, capturing incrementality and halo effects that last-click simply can’t see. Brands doing this well are seeing over 200% higher blended ROAS.

“It’s not just a measurement upgrade – it fundamentally changes how you scale.”

Where does affiliate marketing currently sit within your wider marketing measurement framework?

“Affiliate has changed enormously, and the way we measure it needs to keep pace. We’ve spent a lot of time helping brands move on from the idea that affiliate is simply a last-click conversion channel – because for most of our clients, it’s become much more than that.

“When you look at the modern search results page, affiliate is uniquely positioned across every major placement. At the top, Shopping – typically driven through CSS and affiliate partners. Within AI Overviews and organic results, content-led placements from publishers. And editorial and PR coverage influencing decision-making further up the funnel. Affiliate is the only channel that spans all of these placements – paid, organic, and content – and it does so on a CPA model, meaning brands can scale across all of those touchpoints in a performance-driven, low-risk way.

“Think about the range of partners now active in the space: creators, editorial publishers, closed-user-group communities, technology partners, content commerce platforms. Some are introducing brands to audiences they’ve never reached before. Others are nurturing consideration weeks before a purchase happens. Measuring all of them in the same way doesn’t make sense.

“The brands getting the most from affiliate are the ones treating it as a proper integrated media channel – sitting alongside paid social, search, CRM and PR – rather than a CPA line on a spreadsheet.”

What data or insights would help you and your clients better understand affiliate’s true influence and incremental impact across the shopper journey?

“One of the longstanding challenges in affiliate is that the industry has always been great at showing conversions, but less good at showing influence. We can see the sale – but not always everything that led to it.

“At Acquire, the insights we find most valuable are the ones that shed light on genuine incrementality: new versus returning customer data, cross-device journeys, time-to-conversion, and whether a partner actually created demand or just happened to be there when existing demand converted. As creator and content partnerships grow, there’s also a real need for better engagement data earlier in the funnel – before the click even happens.

“The question we always come back to is: what would have happened if that interaction had never taken place? The more clearly we can answer that, the more honest and useful measurement becomes.”

How are privacy changes, AI search, and zero-click behaviour affecting the ability to measure marketing performance?

“All three are making accurate measurement harder, and that trend isn’t reversing. The industry is moving from deterministic attribution towards something more probabilistic – and brands need to be comfortable with that.

“On AI specifically, only around 0.1% of users are shopping via AI alone right now, and identical queries return different results nearly 90% of the time – so consistency and measurement are still major challenges. What matters more is what we know – that AI visibility is driven by the same principles as strong SEO: authority, backlinks, and structured content. Publishers and editorial partners remain as important as ever.

“The zero-click shift is the more immediate measurement challenge. Affiliate can still drive influence across the SERP, but that value isn’t always captured through last-click. Which is exactly why moving towards blended approaches like MMM – alongside stronger first-party data – has become a priority for us and our clients.”

What would make affiliate marketing more credible in senior-level marketing budget discussions?

“The honest answer is that affiliate needs to get better at speaking the language of the boardroom. Senior leaders care about profitability, customer quality, market share, and sustainable growth – and for too long, our industry has led with efficiency metrics like ROAS and CPA that don’t always connect to those bigger priorities.

“At Acquire, we’ve always pushed for a more holistic view. That means being clear about where affiliate is genuinely driving incremental growth – and being equally honest about where it’s capturing demand that would have converted anyway. That kind of transparency is what builds real trust with senior stakeholders.

“Better incrementality testing, cleaner reporting, and a clearer story around full-funnel contribution would go a long way. The more affiliate can demonstrate actual business impact, not just revenue it happened to be attributed to, the more seriously it gets taken at the table.”