AdRoll State of Performance Marketing Report Finds Nearly 60 Percent of Marketers Plan to Change their Attribution Model in 2017

SAN FRANCISCO, March 7, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- AdRoll, the performance marketing platform, today published its 2017 State of Performance Marketing Report, a survey of more than 1,000 U.S. marketers, business owners and executives that analyzes their perspective on the changing dynamics of the advertising and marketing landscape. The annual report gives detailed insight into how marketers see the future of digital marketing evolving.

The fourth installment of this report explored top-of-mind topics among performance marketers including email marketing, programmatic advertising, retargeting and attribution. For several years, industry experts have suspected that there would be a fundamental shift in how marketers evaluate digital marketing performance. In 2017, attribution is now accelerating to the forefront and is emerging as the highest priority issue for marketers. Industry professionals have intensified their interest in marketing measurement — specifically, better evaluating their efforts and optimizing their decision process. The results confirm that almost 75 percent of marketers find attribution critical or very important to marketing success and nearly 60 percent reported that they plan to take the definitive step of changing their attribution model in 2017.

"Marketing as a discipline is increasingly viewed as a growth driver with direct revenue accountability. This is causing marketers to look for smarter and more sophisticated ways to connect their activities to actual business metrics beyond the rudimentary last click models that have been around for the last 15 years," said Adam Berke, CMO and president of AdRoll. "Attribution has accelerated from a topic that has long loomed in the background, to the top issue marketers are looking to solve. In fact, we're seeing real changes in behavior as the majority of marketers surveyed said they're taking the tangible step of reevaluating their attribution model in 2017."

Additional key findings of the report include:

Programmatic Continues to Shine
Marketers have continued to embrace a programmatic approach to digital marketing:

• Over 50 percent of survey respondents said they are currently investing more than half of their budgets in programmatic initiatives alone — that's up from 32 percent of respondents in 2015.
• Additionally, more than two-thirds of marketers state that programmatic results in a greater return on investment than traditional media.
• To this end, 77 percent of marketers ran programmatic ads on social media in 2016, while 53 percent ran programmatic on mobile and 37 percent did so on video.

Full-Funnel Performance Marketing Holds Value
The full-funnel perspective gives marketers the opportunity to adjust the approach to their campaigns based on where a prospect is in the buying cycle:

• In 2016, marketers allocated 72 percent of their budget to prospecting for new customers and converting those prospective customers; 16 percent of budget went to activating and upselling existing customers
• The most successful channels for attracting new customers, according to marketers, were paid social media (54 percent), organic social media (35 percent), programmatic display (32 percent), and paid search (28 percent).

Email Marketing Goes Dynamic
A majority of marketers stated that their email campaigns populate with content specific to a person's actions taken online:

• Almost 70 percent of marketers surveyed in this year's report claimed that their email campaigns are dynamic based on user behavior — expanding their aims beyond traditional batch sends.
• Loyalty sends are still the most popular (50 percent up 10 percent year-over-year), although lead generation pitches came in second and saw the biggest year-over-year increase (46 percent, up 27 percent year-over-year).
• However, one thing marketers struggled with in 2016 was integrating their email campaigns with their other marketing efforts, such as messaging, reporting, and KPIs. Almost 30 percent of all those who were surveyed said that they are barely somewhat integrated or have no integration whatsoever.

AdRoll partnered with third-party research company Qualtrics to conduct this survey of 1,000 U.S. marketers. To download the full report, visit: www.adroll.com/performance.

About AdRoll
AdRoll is a leading performance marketing platform with over 30,000 clients worldwide. Its suite of high-performance tools works across devices, helping businesses attract, convert, and grow their customer base. The company is home to the world's largest opt-in advertiser data co-op, the IntentMap™ with over 1.2 billion digital profiles. AdRoll's goal is to build the most powerful marketing platform through performance, usability, and openness. 

AdRoll is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Tokyo, London, Dublin, and Sydney. Learn more at www.adroll.com.

SOURCE AdRoll

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