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This is a topic near and dear to my heart. First, didn't realize this was Rand Fishkin writing it. He knows his stuff. He also has another linked article in th

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. First, didn't realize this was Rand Fishkin writing it. He knows his stuff. He also has another linked article in there that is more prescriptive on incrementality measurement being all that matters and how to think about it at a high level and I completely agree it is all the matters. https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-measure-hard-to-measure-marketing-channels/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/how-to-measure-hard-to-measure-ma... That in turn links to another respected analytics leader, Avinash Kaushik: https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/marketing-analytics-attribution-is-not-incrementality/ https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/marketing-analytics-attribut... That is also a must read. The bottom line is what used to work no longer does, and marketers (and finance and leadership) need to get used to having less fidelity and availability than they were used to. It also means marketing teams who are thrashy trying a new low impact tactic every week instead of constructing experiments likely to deliver statistically significant results on incremental lift are going to be spinning their wheels and wasting dollars. And that's something to watch out for. Unfortunately, setting up proper experiments, controlling for bias, getting clean data, etc. are material challenges that require skills, scale (to get a read on bottom of funnel especially), and resources/budget. There aren't great options out there for that now if you're a smaller or mid size company that I'm aware of, though if anyone is aware of them I'd love to have them on my radar.

nottorp 2y ago
> He knows his stuff. Yeah, it's a good exposition of how predatory the "stuff" is :)
- kridsdale3 2y ago
  Each one of the things listed on TA for why attribution is dying is also readable as: 1. Users don't like SEO 2. Users don't like SEO 3. Users don't like SEO 4. Users don't like SEO 5. Users have phones now 6. Phone apps are better UX than websites 7. Users don't like SEO
  - catlikesshrimp 2y ago
    >> 6. Phone apps are better UX than websites I would reword this as: It is better to carry a phone around than to carry a CPU around, which is the same as 5 There is no way I am using my phone for anything other than making a phone call when I am sitting in front of my computer. Funny fact most people didn't live: I had a friend who in the 90's carried a CPU around in the backseat of his car. He thought "smaller computers" were too expensive for what they did and his "portable" computer attracted less robbers
    - frizlab 2y ago
      I use my computer to make phone calls too (thanks Apple integration!)
      - paulmd 2y ago
        Imagine doing this in 2008 or whatever. Google voice was the future. Pff, checking my voicemail? My voicemails get transcribed and texted to me! Then they didn’t update it for 10 years, rolled back a bunch of features, and still have not even implemented RCS despite their full-court marketing push for the mandatory adoption of the standard. Fully expecting they’ll sunset it entirely rather than comply with the EU. I’m trying to rearrange my life so that I can just hop to native iMessage and use that for everything, but I have to run two phone numbers in parallel thanks to all the sms 2fa out there. Oh and that’s degraded too, 99% of sites no longer take SIP numbers (and sendgrid will not send to my gmail address because it’s got “spam” in the name). So I have been having to switch back to my physical phone number over the years, meaning there's a lot of stuff to clean up. Thanks google. Even these core services are just actively enshittified, my experience is quantifiably worse than it was 10-15 years ago.
        talldayo 2y ago
        > and still have not even implemented RCS despite their full-court marketing push for the mandatory adoption of the standard. As a user, I find it hard to be upset about that. RCS as a standard is so bad that my running theory is Google intentionally ruined it so they could promote a broken standard and force Apple to standardize iMessage instead. It's like a thrown-over-the-fence spec that they expect other people to finish for them. I'd have expected the court to block it on the grounds of being an unfair business practice if it didn't promote the smartphone duopoly and surveillance network it entails. And it's not just the security issues, since both protocols suffer dearly for being centralized. It's a further fracturing of a system we can both agree is broken, pushing us towards Another Competing Standard that doesn't even want to compete. Since we're all in agreement that both iMessage and RCS are backdoored just like SMS, can't we just let the government coordinate text messaging and stop wasting everyone's time with proprietary products? It's exhausting and runs opposite to what we expect from modern communications infrastructure.
- kixiQu 2y ago
  Really? The Acquerello example really made me pause – like there are forces pushing in a gentler older-school direction than the surveillance tech I've grown up with.
tictacttoe 2y ago
For low-funnel sponsored advertising, the effects are largely instantaneous, and you can measure your net profit lift simply by turning it on and off every hour (or day).

nottorp 2y ago

> He knows his stuff. Yeah, it's a good exposition of how predatory the "stuff" is :)

kridsdale3 2y ago
Each one of the things listed on TA for why attribution is dying is also readable as: 1. Users don't like SEO 2. Users don't like SEO 3. Users don't like SEO 4. Users don't like SEO 5. Users have phones now 6. Phone apps are better UX than websites 7. Users don't like SEO
- catlikesshrimp 2y ago
  >> 6. Phone apps are better UX than websites I would reword this as: It is better to carry a phone around than to carry a CPU around, which is the same as 5 There is no way I am using my phone for anything other than making a phone call when I am sitting in front of my computer. Funny fact most people didn't live: I had a friend who in the 90's carried a CPU around in the backseat of his car. He thought "smaller computers" were too expensive for what they did and his "portable" computer attracted less robbers
  - frizlab 2y ago
    I use my computer to make phone calls too (thanks Apple integration!)
    - paulmd 2y ago
      Imagine doing this in 2008 or whatever. Google voice was the future. Pff, checking my voicemail? My voicemails get transcribed and texted to me! Then they didn’t update it for 10 years, rolled back a bunch of features, and still have not even implemented RCS despite their full-court marketing push for the mandatory adoption of the standard. Fully expecting they’ll sunset it entirely rather than comply with the EU. I’m trying to rearrange my life so that I can just hop to native iMessage and use that for everything, but I have to run two phone numbers in parallel thanks to all the sms 2fa out there. Oh and that’s degraded too, 99% of sites no longer take SIP numbers (and sendgrid will not send to my gmail address because it’s got “spam” in the name). So I have been having to switch back to my physical phone number over the years, meaning there's a lot of stuff to clean up. Thanks google. Even these core services are just actively enshittified, my experience is quantifiably worse than it was 10-15 years ago.
      - talldayo 2y ago
        > and still have not even implemented RCS despite their full-court marketing push for the mandatory adoption of the standard. As a user, I find it hard to be upset about that. RCS as a standard is so bad that my running theory is Google intentionally ruined it so they could promote a broken standard and force Apple to standardize iMessage instead. It's like a thrown-over-the-fence spec that they expect other people to finish for them. I'd have expected the court to block it on the grounds of being an unfair business practice if it didn't promote the smartphone duopoly and surveillance network it entails. And it's not just the security issues, since both protocols suffer dearly for being centralized. It's a further fracturing of a system we can both agree is broken, pushing us towards Another Competing Standard that doesn't even want to compete. Since we're all in agreement that both iMessage and RCS are backdoored just like SMS, can't we just let the government coordinate text messaging and stop wasting everyone's time with proprietary products? It's exhausting and runs opposite to what we expect from modern communications infrastructure.
kixiQu 2y ago
Really? The Acquerello example really made me pause – like there are forces pushing in a gentler older-school direction than the surveillance tech I've grown up with.

tictacttoe 2y ago

For low-funnel sponsored advertising, the effects are largely instantaneous, and you can measure your net profit lift simply by turning it on and off every hour (or day).