Working out the effectiveness of marketing activity is a tough challenge. The increase in the number of devices a user might have over the last few years has made this even harder.

In the past, a user may have used a PC at work and at home. In many cases, people might do their research or encounter potential providers at work and then complete an enquiry or purchase at home. Today, many individuals at least have a smartphone, if not also a tablet or another device they use. Tracking the multiple touch-points of a campaign and arriving at any conclusions about attribution is a hard problem.

Google are doing a lot of work in this area and have just announced ‘Estimated Total Conversions‘ – which will help marketers running AdWords on Search to get benchmarked estimated conversions for their campaigns. It looks like they are working to be able to feed this data back into the bidding system for AdWords in the future. This is positive development for campaign evaluation and will provide a useful set of data-points for when it comes to overall campaign evaluations. Good further comment on this development here.