Thoughts from our CEO - Brennen Bliss
A quick note on timing: This post reflects the state of things at the time of writing. In this fast-paced field, new developments are always emerging.
March 25th, 2025
Just finished reading a fascinating paper by Ron Berman from Wharton on advertising attribution models. As someone who's helped dozens of travel companies optimize their marketing spend, this research confirms what I've seen in practice.
The paper confirms a counter-intuitive truth: last-touch attribution (which 54% of marketers still use!) can actually LOWER advertiser profits in many scenarios compared to using no attribution at all. 😮
Most interesting findings:
▪️ When ad returns are decreasing (each additional exposure has less impact), last-touch overestimates the value of publishers that appear EARLIER in the conversion funnel - not later as commonly believed
▪️ The Shapley value attribution method consistently outperforms last-touch across various scenarios
▪️ Publishers appearing early in conversion paths actually benefit most from last-touch (contrary to popular belief)
This validates our approach at Propellic - Travel Marketing: we've moved most clients beyond simplistic last-touch to more sophisticated methods that account for the full customer journey - like Google's Data Driven Attribution, based on the Shapley model.
For travel marketers dealing with complex, multi-touch customer journeys, the implications are significant. Are you still using last-touch, or have you evolved your attribution?
Drop your comments here.
Brennen Bliss, CEO at Propellic
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