Atlas' Engagement Mapping is out of beta

A year ago, there was a post by Bob Heyman on Media Post Search Insider that I found very interesting. He talks about how search receives too much credit in ad campaigns where the "last click" model is typically used. He points to a case study that showed that when a portion of display advertising yielding the highest CPA had been discontinued, overall conversions dropped along with conversions from search, a sign that the seemingly underperforming media was having a significant impact on brand awareness without receiving proper credit.

Eyeblaster recently launched a tool that allows advertisers to see which ads a user was exposed to prior to converting through paid search. From Marketingvox:

Eyeblaster launched Channel Connect for Search, which enables marketers to track users that are exposed to, or that interact with, display ads — even if they don't immediately convert.

A couple of days ago, Atlas announced that Engagement Mapping was out of beta and available to all existing clients for use. 'Engagement Mapping,' also known as multiple attribution gives credit to every online advertiser touch point before a user converts. Jason Heller wrote a great post about Engagement Mapping and does a better job explaining it than I could.

Atlas is able to track these touch points by placing cookies on user's browsers. To do this, all ads that are being tracked will need an Atlas redirect, which is the point where Atlas loads the cookie. So if a different agency handles search from display advertising, redirects would have to be implemented by the agency handling search.

I look forward to trying this out in the near future.