Matt – I was fascinated by your description of the Y! Search Analytics. That is new to me and very interesting. I certainly will explore it further. Thanks for sharing.
Is it possible to integrate this data with web analytics? Put that into Y! WA and you have a killer app.

I forgot to mention that Omniture have a plugin (cross-visit participation) that enables you to “stack” up marketing activity. Essentially you can capture the campaign path visitors take. It is worth a read:
http://blogs.omniture.com/2009/03/09/cross-visit-participation-inside-omniture-sitecatalyst/

Regards,
Michael

Thank you for the thorough and detailed set of comments. We at YWA, by no means, tell ourselves that we conquered attribution. Which I also believe you see very well from the post itself. I am actually somewhat admitting that some of the players might be colored, no harm intended, to some extent.

I liked, which echo your comment Michael, the following statement from Forrester:

“Given today’s challenging economic times, attribution is critically important because so many organizations are questioning the value of their outbound marketing efforts. Marketers should begin measuring multicampaign attribution now, before it becomes a corporate mandate.”

And some of the research also confirmed the need of actually being able to provide ad-hoc AND custom attribution as you talk about. This is a study performed by Forrester as well:

In conclusion; I believe it is likely that you will see Web Analytics vendors provide either access to RAW data, so you can go work your own attribution models, or provide more flexible interfaces, so you can manage multiple unequal touch-points.

Again. Thank you for the great input.

Cheers
d. :-)

Funny that you bring up attribution because it’s been a hot topic at Yahoo! We’ve had many discussions surrounding attribution models (including ongoing disucssions about view-through attribution and weighting). In fact, Yahoo! Search Analytics (not to be confused with Yahoo! Web Analytics) provides an attribution metric called Assists. Assists show you the total number of times that a clicked ad contributed to the conversion of another clicked ad.

Here’s an example…

A visitor clicks on a Sony laptop banner ad, reaches the web site, but does not convert. Later (within 45 days), the same visitor goes to Yahoo! and seaches for the key term “sony laptop”. They click on the PPC ad, reach the web site and this time convert.

The result? The Sony laptop banner ad is attributed with an Assist while the search ad (“sony laptop”) is attributed with the conversion. So not only are you able to see how a campaign/ad converts on its own, but vis Assists, you’re now able to see the total number of times that the campaign/ad contributed to additional conversions.

This level of attribution is changing the way our advertisers manage their online ad budgets. In cases where advertisers may have lowered the budget for a display ad because it didn’t convert well on its own, now they’re realizing that the display ad is more valuable at driving conversions to other ads such as search. So rather than pulling back on their budgets, they’re maintaining the budget and in other cases throwing more budget dollars at it.

And Assists aren’t just regulated to Yahoo! related properties. With Yahoo! Search Analytics, you can track outide the Yahoo network. You can track Assists and conversions for your email campaigns, shopping comparison ads, affiliate ads, display, and even other search ads (like Google and MSN).

It’s the only major search engine that provides cross channel attribution metrics. I invite you to try it out if you have Yahoo! search campaigns ruinning.

Dennis, of course, can speak more closey to Yahoo! Web Analytics and its approach to attribution.