For all those tracking and attribution solutions out there that rely heavily on cookies (ahem, most of them), the launch of the new IE browser is was going to put a serious crimp in your style. The new Internet Explorer is was going to be the first browser that enabled "Do Not Track" as the default, much to the dislike of advertisers nation-wide.

But that died a quick death.

At some point however, advertsiers and publishers are going to have to face facts. Cookie tracking doesn't work– the single user / multiple device pretty much crushed the accuracy of this technology years ago, and those who rely on it are just hanging on to an illusion.

There are alternatives. Better ones.

You can try and promote the Login or App, where users log into an account (say Facebook or some tag-along app) and the tracking begins. You could get their online behaviors and probably their credit card. That means you could connect offline purchases with online activities.  

Combined with data from people logging into their internet TV (like AppleTV), online magazines and mobile location information, this type of tracking could be an amazing leap for marketers…if you can get people to go along with it. Of course the problem is that this effort failed 10 years ago - could it work today? We have a different society now, but that society is both more open (social media) and more closed (concerns over personal information security online).

Best case, this type of adoption on a mass scale is still a few years away at least I would guess.

So what will you do in the meantime? My suggestion has always been macro-attribution, using a test-and-scale methodology. That is, isolating certain areas to test media strategy, preferably geared towards a specific customer segment. Then looking at marginal changes in trustworthy KPIs - things like Impression volume, site visits, online actions, inbound calls and store sales in those areas. Learn more about these methods here and here.

Even if you dodged a bullet this time, Do Not Track is coming... what's your plan?

I came across some interesting infographics from the end of last year pertaining to marketing measurement. What I found interesting in particular, was the obvious lack of one important graphic. Obvious to me, anyway.
 

As you can see, "Changes in consumer behavior" is one of the key issues driving the development of marketing measurement and accountability programs. These changes I assume, cover shifts in online behaviors. As in, the proliferation of devices consumers now use to access and engage with the Internet.

Yet, with all this fragmentation, I see nothing in terms of measurement 'tools' that could help solve tracking across multiple devices. I see lots about web analytics, but what web analytics tool can tell me how online marketing is driving sales for customers who search from their work desktop computer, follow up on their iPad during the train-ride home, and call from their mobile device from their house?

Macro-economic attribution is the answer: using geo-targeted media testing to understand the true conversion - and impact - of web marketing. Learn more

In the first line of an article I read about Steve Jobs (and I recommend reading the whole thing) it says, "He connected the humanities to the sciences, creativity to technology, arts to engineering. There were greater technologists (Wozniak, Gates), and certainly better designers and artists. But no one else in our era could better firewire together poetry and processors in a way that jolted innovation."

This line got me thinking about connections, specifically in my own industry.

Often in Marketing, especially online, people specialize. There's the brand agency, concerned with art and design and feeling, there's the tracking company who scares you with how precisely they can catalog your web surfing, and there's the attribution firm, whose complex mathematical equations may give you a headache before they tell you where sales come from.

But who can put these things together in a way that makes sense for business leaders, who need to make decisions, scale their companies and answer their customers needs? To do this you need to fuse an understanding of art and science, and discard some of both: make the connection between media and sales.

In doing so, you'll find the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.