Your own marketing activity is the biggest cannibalizing factor over your marketing performance. 

Strange? Ironic? Annoying?

The answer is yes.

Don’t believe us - just look at the graph from Uber’s lawsuit against multiple ad-networks, claiming fraud.

Uber discovered this ad fraud scheme when they paused 10% of their advertising budget, seeing that while paid signups “declined” - these were compensated by almost 1:1 increase in organic signups.

Marketing is a means to an end, helping your company grow its customer base, revenues or both, while advertising to attract new customers or increase the spend by existing customers.

If your marketing results are positive, but your organic traffic is down - there are a few things you should understand and check:

Last Touch Attribution

Last Touch attribution is the status quo for attribution. In the mobile app industry - it is the only method of attribution, as while the app is hosted on the operating system app store - data sharing is limited forcing the app developer/advertiser to rely on attribution to happen only based on the ad vendor generating the last click or view. 

Last Touch Attribution tells you that 100% of the credit goes to the vendor that “touched” the user last. 

Over attribution is extremely common with Last Touch attribution. As a product becomes more known and popular, consumers search and interact with it more and more, leading to a point where consumers may unknowingly and worse off - involuntarily engage with an ad on their way to the conversion point, causing the attribution platform to credit a vendor for the conversion, while the user intent was to convert organically. 

ROAS vs. T.ROAS

Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) is probably the most common goal marketers optimize towards. But ROAS may be deceptive if the marketing goals ignore the Total Return (T.ROAS)

The graph below shows ROAS vs. marketing spend and conversions attributed to paid marketing. 

Looking at the table below, we can see that while marketing conversions and revenues went up - marketing activities are essentially cannibalizing organic results.

...leading to poor overall results

INCRMNTAL is a platform to test incrementality in Advertising. The platform uses marketing and traffic data to provide actionable insights to eliminate cannibalization and increase incrementality. 

If you want to learn more, visit INCRMNTAL or book a demo today!