Having worked on the publisher side for most of my web dev career, I can say with confidence that most ad spend attribution is a load of crock. Sure people along the line claim to have attribution figured out but, coincidentally, they all attribute your spend to their "value add."
The incentives of the current ad system and ad spend attribution for everyone along the chain from publisher => advertiser are all misaligned and almost no one is doing it properly. It's so bad because everyone gets paid to turn a blind eye.
For example, lack of good bot detection. Publishers benefit by higher CPC/CPM. Ad networks, ad agencies, and creative agencies all benefit because they take a vig off of total # of ads served and/or total ad spend. Average individual paid ad buyers benefit from the vagaries of the system because it allows them to justify spend by correlation, not causation (e.g. I bought this KW and traffic went up! Too bad conversions and revenue didn't.....)
Like organic SEO, the gulf between the average and the good is huge. If you find a good paid ad manager, hold on to them because they can be worth their weight in gold.
Most companies either use a neutral third party attribution product or build their own system. They're not simply trusting the attribution stated by the companies along the line. I agree that those are all biased. I also believe many of the neutral and home grown attribution systems don't work very well.
The incentives of the current ad system and ad spend attribution for everyone along the chain from publisher => advertiser are all misaligned and almost no one is doing it properly. It's so bad because everyone gets paid to turn a blind eye.
For example, lack of good bot detection. Publishers benefit by higher CPC/CPM. Ad networks, ad agencies, and creative agencies all benefit because they take a vig off of total # of ads served and/or total ad spend. Average individual paid ad buyers benefit from the vagaries of the system because it allows them to justify spend by correlation, not causation (e.g. I bought this KW and traffic went up! Too bad conversions and revenue didn't.....)
Like organic SEO, the gulf between the average and the good is huge. If you find a good paid ad manager, hold on to them because they can be worth their weight in gold.