Blogged in collaboration with Rebecca McAdams, Research Associate, serving Customer Insights professionals.

Consumers are connected, constantly influenced by marketing messages, their friend’s social posts, blog posts, reviews, mobile messages, and Twitter posts. In fact, US Adults have an average of three connected devices.  Consumers are leaving breadcrumbs of information behind, across multiple channels and devices.  Marketers are jumping at the chance to connect with their customers through proactive marketing campaigns and even through non-marketing interactions. But which interactions actually drive impact? What interactions are responsible for sales conversions, and which interactions merely "assist" conversions?  CI Pros and marketers are stumped; they must measure these complex interactions to help drive future marketing and media investments and to actually measure their marketing efforts.  

Well, look no further. Today, I’m happy to publish The Forrester Wave: Cross-Channel Attribution Providers, Q4 2014. Attribution accurately measures the impact each marketing tactic, each interaction, on a customer action—whether it’s driving to the website, buying a product, or downloading an application. This report evaluates eight vendors on core criteria, including attribution approach, measurement and reporting competency, activation capabilities. 

Forrester defines cross-channel attribution as: The practice of using advanced statistical approaches to allocate proportional credit to marketing communications and media activity across all channels, which ultimately leads to the desired customer action.

The cross-channel attribution market is an extremely fragmented list of players across the services and technologies space. Over the past two years, the attribution market has seen a variety of new entrants — from traditional marketing mix modeling providers to new startups and ad technologies. A broad array of vendors focuses on cross-channel measurement, and marketers turn to these firms to provide guidance on development, management, and analysis of complex marketing efforts. These vendors provide what customers are looking for: turning insights into action, calculating accurate customer and channel performance metrics, providing a holistic view of the customer purchase path, and taming the messiness of big data.

I would like to thank all the vendors for their participation in the report; we recognize how grueling the Wave process can be and sincerely appreciate the time and effort you all put in. I also extend my gratitude to the Forrester team that made this happen: Mary Pilecki, Noel Yuhanna, Tyler Shields, Fatemeh Khatibloo, and Rebecca McAdams.

Forrester clients can read the full report here, but keep in mind that the written report just scratches the surface of the full evaluation. Download the interactive scorecard tool and use it to customize the Forrester Wave model for your organization’s needs. Please feel free to set up an inquiry!

Marketers and CI professionals frequently tell us that they want a better measurement technique to accurately determine the true performance of channels and customers. I am pleased to announce that today we published The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Attribution Providers, Q2 2012.  This vendor review is a result of countless hours of vendor reviews and assessments, in-person briefing reviews, customer calls, fact checking, and countless hours of intensive research work.

• Companies are investing in attribution. Marketers are seeking expert advice for the best ways to measure their channels with more precision. Attribution approach can provide a more concise way of measuring true channel and customer performance. And that’s something organizations are hungry for. To do this, they need help developing attribution models and making sense of all their data.
• Cross- channel attribution is a relatively immature market. Vendors have fairly immature cross-channel attribution offerings. Most continue to emphasize digital attribution but are rapidly expanding to include additional channels, while also developing future marketing scenario-planning capabilities.
• Marketers want real-time, accurate results that will drive their marketing strategies. Because marketers struggle with understanding the true performance of channels, they lack visibility into where to make the proper marketing investments. By employing an attribution approach, organizations can better understand how their offline and online channels are really affecting the bottom line. Once they understand what's driving revenue, firms can provide recommendations on where brands should invest their dollars.

 For even more research on attribution, my colleague Ari Osur, who serves the Interactive Marketing role, has also published The Forrester Wave™: Interactive Attribution Vendors, Q2 2012, which reviews the state of providers that handle attribution across digital specific channels. Ari and I collaborated throughout the process, and while there is some overlap in the vendors taking part, the two reports are evaluated and written for different roles. The cross-channel report is written for CI professionals and puts a premium on customer-centric insights. Like all Forrester Wave™ reports, readers of either report can download vendor scorecards and customize the weightings to reflect their own needs.