Attribution is breaking, completely

We’ve spent years trying to make marketing perfectly measurable. Some people even believe that without attribution tracking one can’t measure the success of a campaign.

And while attribution was always a sort of pseudo-science, it is about to get a lot worse. Zero-click search is real, AI is increasingly answering questions without sending users to websites. The tracking that has been disappearing for the last decade, has slowly (and soon suddenly) been disappearing. Bit by bit, the trail between someone discovering a hotel and eventually booking it is disappearing.

The good news for hotels is that people still need somewhere to sleep. Rooms still need to be booked. Demand isn’t disappearing, our ability to confidently explain exactly how someone arrived at the booking is.

Maybe AI platforms will give us brilliant new attribution tools. But between the old tracking infrastructure breaking down and whatever replaces it becoming established, we may spend a few years looking at bookings and having surprisingly little idea where some of them came from.

We’ll be going back to that sophisticated analytics tool from 1987, asking the guest: “How did you hear about us?”. Ironically, it is probably a good idea. [also a good idea to subscribe to my newsletter here]

Tracking and attribution dependence is a problem in many marketing meetings, mostly because one side thinks it is an absolute science and the other knows it is a guesstimate at best.

Losing some attribution might force us back toward skills we should never have abandoned such as looking at patterns, using intuition, observing correlations etc. That doesn’t mean abandoning data, but rather becoming more comfortable with data being incomplete and our intelligence used to fill the gaps.

Perhaps the next generation of great hotel marketers won’t be the people with the most sophisticated attribution dashboards. They’ll be the ones who can make good decisions when the dashboard doesn’t have the answer.

Which, when you think about it, is what the good marketers have done historically for decades.