#LDS15 VIDEO: Payments, Panels, and the Push for Mobile Attribution

Offline attribution has become one of the defining challenges of the mobile advertising industry. Consumers are often using their devices to make purchases in stores — not online — creating an ongoing measurement headache for both brands and media buyers.

But a few different companies are working on linking what consumers do on a device to what they do in the real-world. At Street Fight’s Local Data Summit in Denver earlier this month, panelists Dorothee Bergin, head of marketing infrastructure at at xAd, David Shim, CEO of Placed and Robin Opie, chief analytics officer of Datalogix, discussed specific strategies that their companies are using to gather and analyze mobile data.

For instance, Placed is using a panel-based methodology with users who have opted in to an app that gathers location data all the time and can track consumer purchase behavior. Bergin noted that using a panel to measure store visitation lift is one of the most reliable methods, but not all strategies are able to provide the same return at scale.

“I think we could see more scalable solutions coming in the future, but for today it’s really only directionally useful,” Bergin said.