For the First Time, Majority of Marketers Are Using Multi-Touch Attribution for Marketing Analytics

MMA Global, the association devoted to architecting the future of marketing, released its annual State of Attribution Marketer Benchmark Report. For the first time since MMA Global released the survey results in 2016, over half of marketers (53%) are using multi-touch attribution (MTA) to track and optimize marketing performance. Adoption has risen steadily over the past six years, dipping slightly in 2021 and rebounding dramatically in 2022 with a nearly 33% increase.

“For more than a decade, marketers have been trying to capture the holy grail of MTA, an essential solution for rationalizing investments in relevant ads, content, experiences, and channels that better impact consumers and drive growth,” said Brad Feinberg, VP of Media and Consumer Engagement at Molson Coors. “This year’s State of Attribution Survey shows that marketers are closer than ever to achieving that goal.”

MTA adds scale, granularity and actionability in unified measurement and attribution. Specifically:

• Scale &granularity: MTA users are far more satisfied (70%) than non-users (42%) with the ability to measure the effectiveness of a large part of their marketing spend.
• Actionability: MTA users are better able (63%) than non-users (51%) to apply learnings immediately to optimize their spend allocation.
• As MTA matures, expectations and reality are coming closer together in terms of scope (about a third of media can be tracked by MTA) and ROI contribution, among users and non-users of MTA.

Despite the advancing maturity of MTA—27% of marketers are currently at full deployment—the overall Net Promoter Score (NPS) for MTA solution providers remains in negative territory at -16, up from -42 in 2016. Challenges around access to walled gardens activity, data sharing rules, and implementation difficulties all contribute to marketers’ frustrations with cracking the attribution code, according to this year’s research.

“We are definitely seeing progress vs previous years, but there is so much change happening in the media and measurement ecosystem that getting MTA right is still a moving target for both marketers and MTA companies alike” said Vas Bakopoulos, SVP of Research of MMA Global.

Additionally, while even non-users see MTA as a crucial part of a unified measurement strategy, many marketers agree that more effort is needed to consolidate campaign results from MTA and other tools into clear and actionable scorecards for management, and nearly half of the marketers surveyed can’t conclusively determine which tactics perform best.

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“While marketers are showing a willingness to experiment, they have a long way to go in terms of reconciling results from different tools,” said Greg Stuart, CEO of MMA Global. “We are not at the place a CFO and CEO will trust marketing, and we must be better. We’re learning that marketers view MTA as an important piece of a larger performance puzzle which is why we have taken on development of MTA and other marketing measurement topics on as a critically important MMA initiative in our Marketing Attribution Think Tank (MATT) as a way to help provide guidance and development.”

Comprised of over 800-member companies globally and 15 regional offices, the MMA is the only marketing trade association that, brings together the full ecosystem of marketers, martech and media companies working collaboratively to architect the future of marketing, while relentlessly delivering growth today. Led by CMOs, the MMA helps marketers lead the imperative for marketing change–in ways that enable future breakthroughs while optimizing current activities