The Reality of Attribution Models in the Age of TikTok

Adapt or die. Marketers are animals. Devoured by technology they failed to understand, they live in constant fight or flight mode. They need to adapt to AI, new channels, new creatives, loss of signal, conversion APIs… the list goes on and on.

One of the toughest challenges for CMOs is to understand where to put their money. Setting dollars afire on the Facebook altar doesn’t work anymore. Outbidding your competitors on Google is not enough. You are now, more than ever, competing for attention, and it’s happening over a split second. It’s happening on TikTok. How do you compare the dollars you spend on keywords and the dollars you spend promoting UGC content? How do you compare the walled garden of Facebook ecosystem with the wild and radical ads you can skip on TikTok. If you are a confused CMO, you are not alone. It’s a confusing world.

TikTok and other social media platforms have become the go-to destination for people to spend their time. As a result, traditional media has seen a decline in its prominence, influence, and even advertising revenue. This shift in media consumption habits has significantly impacted how information is consumed and, perhaps most importantly for marketers, how consumers are driven to purchase.

Accurately measuring the effectiveness of social ads has been a constant challenge, because of these continual shifts in behavior, technology, and platforms. The limitations of most attribution models and the technological changes over recent years have made the task even harder.

Each social platform has its strengths and weaknesses, whether related to engagement, reach, conversation, or conversion, but that also holds true with measurement and attribution. A recent study found that a click-only attribution method undervalues TikTok purchases by a staggering 73% for app advertisers. Relying solely on click-based metrics massively underestimates the actual impact of TikTok ads on driving conversions and revenue.

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"If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.” - supposedly from Albert Einstein

“TikTok may not be very good at generating clicks or responding to intent like Google Search, but it’s very good at providing content people want to watch and driving conversion while doing that. Why should we measure it with Last Click attribution?” - definitely from Marc Olivier Meunier

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At Shook, we suggest several best practices to optimize attribution measurement and make informed decisions. One key recommendation is to turn on both view-through and click-through attribution for TikTok campaigns. By doing so, marketers can exit the learning phase much faster and achieve excellent performance stability. This is because incorporating view-through attribution allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the customer journey, capturing those customers who discovered a brand on TikTok but may not have clicked on the ad.

The optimal view-through window varies across industries. A 16-day view-through window is recommended for the travel industry, while the optimal window for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) is 19 days. Gaming, on the other hand, benefits from a shorter 3-day view-through window. TikTok offers a maximum view-through window of 7 days, which is highly recommended for all campaigns.

Marketers can leverage various tools and solutions available to measure the impact of TikTok ads accurately. These tools provide insights into the effectiveness of different ad formats, creative strategies, and targeting options on TikTok. Marketers can make data-driven decisions to optimize their TikTok ad campaigns and maximize their return on investment (ROI) by analyzing these data points.

Click-only attribution methods fall very short of capturing the true impact of TikTok views on purchases. Marketers need to embrace a more holistic approach that incorporates view-through attribution and leverages the available tools and solutions to measure the effectiveness of their TikTok ad campaigns accurately. By doing so, they can unlock the full potential of TikTok as a powerful marketing platform and drive meaningful results for their brands. We’ve seen the results when clients take a more holistic approach and urge all of our clients to adapt to these changes.

I hope you are less confused now, if you were a confused CMO.

If not, we need to speak.

Send us a note and let us know how we can help!

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