Today, attribution is becoming increasingly challenging, even for the mighty Walled Gardens of Digital Marketing.

Apple deprecated 3rd party cookies in Safari in 2019.

Two years later, iOS 14 was released, and the 'Identifier for Advertising'(IDFA) usage on iOS was removed from the marketing platform.

Since then, attribution has become a major problem for all marketing platforms, including Walled Garden Meta and Google.

Google, which was supposed to depreciate 3rd party cookies this year, recently said it wouldn't do it.

They have tried FLOC and Topics API over the last three years yet have not found an effective alternative for third-party cookies.

If we extrapolate this Google's action, they probably won't deprecate Google Advertising ID(GAID), either.

One important reason for this action is the role of third-party cookies and GAID/IDFA in campaign attribution.

They are the threads that stitch the user actions with the campaign outcome.

And now they are taking a new route.

Two weeks back, Facebook announced a vital optimization feature that is yet to be released.

Incrementality-based conversion optimization.

In a nutshell, this is incrementally based conversion optimization.

Let's say you are getting 100 conversions daily on your website and starting a Facebook campaign today for a $100 daily budget.

If you start getting 120 conversions tomorrow, the Meta dashboard will say you got 20 incremental conversions from the campaign, with an incremental CAC of $5.

You will also get attributed conversion and attributed CAC in the dashboard.

How do they negate seasonality and other actions influencing this 20 conversion increase?

Two ways.

Conversion API

• Once you implement the Facebook conversion API, the Meta ad engine gets all your funnel and conversion events, so it knows seasonality.

• Recently, Meta opened up GA4 integration. This way, Meta gets all the channel-level information.

Will Google also move in this incrementally based attribution?

Highly unlikely.

In the case of Google, their attributed numbers will always be higher than the incremental number.

Can you tell me why? Comment below.

Recently, we studied Google incrementally for mid-large brands.

Even excluding brand keywords, all the Google campaigns are only 60% incremental.

For every 100 attributed conversions we get, we only get 60 conversions as incremental conversions.

However, it can happen under two conditions.

• If all the other players, including Meta, gravitated toward incremental conversion

• If the privacy watchdogs force Google to deprecate 3rd party cookies and GAID

So what should we do with all of this happening?

Build an internal system and dashboard to measure incremental conversion from day 1. And this is the only way to be one step ahead of the curve.