From clicks to clarity: Media Mix Modelling Q&A with Gen3 Marketing

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

“Clients are increasingly wanting to measure incrementality, without fully grasping what they are asking for. They see different results in their internal (usually default GA4) analytics and feel voucher code driven sales would “happen anyway”. “When it comes to on-site optimisation like intent.ly, they often don’t see the sale tracked internally as they are looking at the wrong reporting set-up in GA that doesn’t track these on-site conversions, attributing the sale to the original traffic source instead.”

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

“Affiliate is reported on a last click basis and therefore is at odds with a client’s “true north” reporting, which aims to look at more of an DDA/MTA model. As the data is not there to support the sale, it is not seen as incremental and easy to reject as a sale.”

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

“If you look at GA4, it needs something like 400 instances of the same user journey to become relevant enough in DDA to be properly attributed. This is fine for Paid Search or Paid Social where the Source/Medium/ Channel remain constant.

“In affiliates, we have a far more disjointed set-up and therefore there is a far greater risk of our sales paths missing the mark with many smaller clients. Establishing an industry-wide nomenclature is likely to help here, but is probably too hard to implement. This would make it a lot easier for affiliate sales to be tracked and to also show its place in the path to purchase – and not just as the last click.”

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

“Seeing cashback being tracked unconditionally has helped, but we see issues where cashback is tracked on Apple devices (usually using Safari as the default) and while this is tracked in Awin, it’s not tracked in the brands default analytics and this creates questions around incrementality again. I believe this is something TopCashback are looking to address shortly, so that will hopefully make a bigger impact.

“AI searches are on the increase and we do see evidence of zero click sales or codes being used without an affiliate click being registered and are likely to see more brands looking to adopt coupon code tracking.”

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

“Affiliate needs to start aligning with CMO-speak and talk more about target audience, reach, frequency, dwell time – rather than just clicks and conversion. To show the value of affiliate in a more upper-funnel framing, we need to use the marketing language used by Paid Search, Paid Social and even OOH / TV. Focus on user journey metrics more and less on last click.”