Singular can now track ROI across channels, with deterministic attribution

From Singular

Marketing intelligence platform Singular has added a new capability to its platform that is designed to determine a complete return-on-investment (ROI) by combining cross-channel attribution with cross-channel marketing spend.

Since its founding in 2014, the San Francisco-based company has offered attribution and ROI, but in device-specific silos, beginning with its origins in mobile.

But the new Cross-Platform and Cross-Device ROI Analytics capability on its existing Marketing Intelligence Platform, CEO Gadi Eliashiv said in an interview, now connects attribution, spend and ROI across channels, giving a more complete view of an ad’s impact.

An example of the different approach. In the past, Singular said, a brand might run a Facebook ad on desktop at a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) of $50. Suppose a user clicked on the ad, went to the website of clothing retailer StitchFix on desktop, and made a $100 purchase on that site.

A month later, let’s say, the same person saw a Google search ad for StitchFix on the mobile web, for a CPA of $25. When clicked, the ad leads the user to install the StitchFix app, and then the user made a $100 purchase through the app.

Previously, Singular said, that sequence would be seen on its platform as two independent journeys, with a 2X ROI on Facebook in the first journey ($50 became $100) and a 4X return through Google in the second journey ($25 became $100).

Now, an integrated view of a single user across desktop and mobile might rate the Facebook ad as a 4X investment, since a $50 investment on Facebook eventually led to $200 in sales from that person.

This could be also be interpreted as a retargeting/re-engagement success, where the Facebook ad led to a purchase, an app install, and another purchase. In any case, it’s a ROI analysis that is cross-platform, tied to attribution and spend, and accounts for the impact of the Facebook ad a month earlier. Here’s a Singular screen showing some ROI results for other use cases:

Over 2000 connections. Eliashiv said he expects much of marketers’ spend is misjudged as to impact, because of the difficulty of tracking attribution and spend across channels.

Singular acquires data from in-app SDKs, as well as more than 2000 API connectors to ad networks, site trackers, customer data platforms, analytics solutions and internal business intelligence solutions. Access is granted to these sources by the client company, and the data can be broken down by campaign, creative or publisher.

Eliashiv said about 95 percent of his company’s attribution is deterministic, meaning it is definitive across channels through the use of a connecting persistent identifier, like an email address. The remainder is probabilistic, or matched via likely connections.

Why you should care. Modern customer journeys to one or more sales are rarely a straightforward line in one channel, since they pop between devices and between online and offline, and they happen over time.

For this reason, tracking a customer’s journey across devices and channels, and determining which ads or other marketing impacted sales decisions over time, is the trickiest but the most important challenge facing digital marketers.

Singular claims its new capability offers a unique granularity and scale for cross-channel ROI, because of the scope of its data collection for campaign actions, sales results online and offline, and marketing spend, and because its attribution is almost entirely deterministic.

This story first appeared on MarTech Today. For more on marketing technology, click here.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.