Google Attribution is a free and easy way to evaluate marketing efforts

Google is announcing a new beta for Google Attribution, a free tool for examining the role that different marketing strategies play in customer purchasing decisions.


BEAM Team

29 May, 2017

Google Attribution is a free and easy way to evaluate marketing efforts | BEAMSTART News

- From our Sponsors -

At Google’s Marketing Next conference, the company is announcing a new beta for Google Attribution, a free tool for examining the role that different marketing strategies play in customer purchasing decisions.

Regardless of device or marketing channel, Google wants Attribution to be a home for evaluating marketing campaigns. By creating a tight loop between strategy, ad spend and feedback, Google aims to make the tool attractive to marketers that feel last-click models don’t sufficiently explain customer behavior.

A panacea for attribution is not a new construct in the world of marketing. Companies like Adobe and startups like BrightFunnel and Bizible have been developing tools for years that allow marketers to break the old last-click paradigm.

Up until recently, most marketers would credit any sale to the last touchpoint their company had with a customer. This flawed strategy allows marketers to quantitatively evaluate marketing campaigns, but its more of a heuristic than a ground truth.

New machine learning-powered methods enable marketers to model the relative contribution of disparate advertising efforts. This is a much more informative method of evaluation. In the real world, video ads, banner ads, emails and other materials all work in consonance to drive conversions — it doesn’t make sense for the final social media ad to get all the credit.

“We capture the clicks, as long as there was a click, we can, for example, say how many of the conversations were from the social channel,” explained Babak Pahlavan, Google’s senior director of product management for analytics and measurement, in an interview.

Google Attribution should offer marketers a clearer picture of their efforts to facilitate a more accurate cost-benefit analysis. We haven’t gotten our hands on Google Attribution yet so its hard to say how its performance stacks up against its peers. That said, Google doesn’t seem to be arguing that the tool’s superiority is a product of performance.

Instead, Google is touting ease of use, copious integrations and zero cost (for some). The company does plan on charging for its enterprise pro deployment, but even so, Google’s scale is dangerous.

Google’s attribution efforts kicked into high gear back in 2014 when the company acquired Adometry, a startup specializing in measuring marketing impact. Adometry was quickly transformed into Attribution 360 and rolled out as part of Google’s Analytics 360 Suite. The last two years has been about rebuilding the tool on the Google stack and simplifying it, Pahlavan told me.

For now, Google Attribution is stuck in beta, but the company says that advertisers should expect a deeper roll out in the near future.

- From our Sponsors -

Latest Jobs

Founding engineer

Upshift

North Carolina,

Full Time

USD 120000 — USD 250000 yearly

Senior Product Engineer, AI Agents

Amplitude

California,

Full Time

USD 203000 — USD 305000 yearly

Summer 2026 ML Systems Intern

Partcl

California,

Internship

USD 6000 — USD 10000 yearly

Pearson Labs: Full Stack Engineer

Pearson Labs

California,

Full Time

USD 120000 — USD 150000 yearly

Associate Account Executive

DeepSource

California,

Full Time

USD 140000 — USD 180000 yearly

DevOps/Infrastructure Engineer for Robotics - San Francisco

Polymath Robotics

California,

Full Time

USD 120000 — USD 200000 yearly

Design Engineer, iOS - React Native

Slash

California,

Full Time

USD 175000 — USD 250000 yearly

Technical Lead, Frontend

Onyx

California,

Full Time

USD 200000 — USD 400000 yearly

Frontend Engineer

Fern

New York,

Full Time

USD 170000 — USD 210000 yearly

BEAMSTART is a hub for everything Startups, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation. Connect with a global community of people, and stay updated with the latest startup jobs, news, and discussions.

 
© 2016 - 2025 BEAMSTART. All Rights Reserved (Legal).