There seems to be an increased buzz around cross-channel media attribution from many vendors lately and although we posted on the subject of attribution before we never really got into the nuts and bolts of the different platform options so here you go.

Check out the below slides we recently pulled together for one of our clients - the 1st part is a recap on cross-channel media attribution best practice in case you're new to the topic but the 2nd part goes into the detailed pros and cons of the various different technology platforms we've had experience with.

• Google Analytics multi-channel funnels
• Adobe SiteCatalyst Cross-Visit Participation JavaScript plugin, Light Server Calls and DoubleClick/Mediamind Genesis integration
• Atlas, Mediamind and DoubleClick ad server based purchase path tracking plus custom media attribution modelling
• Specialised ClearSaleing media attribution platform and out-of-the-box reports

Finally, it's important to make a distinction between media attribution and purchase path tracking, one is necessary to enable the other but they are not the same. Tracking the complete purchase path, i.e. every paid and organic campaign touch point leading up to a conversion is a necessary requirement to be able to actually do media attribution or the allocation or conversion credits back to those touch points. The purchase path tracking is the data collection if you so want and the media attribution the actual analysis or modelling part - given attribution modeling is only as good as the underlying data the below slides are focusing manly on the data collection aspects of the different options.

YouTube just announced the next generation of their video analytics feature which uses the same data as the old Insights tool. To be honest, not much has changed apart from an interface design upgrade but it's nice to see that this has become a focus again and we can only hope this will get included into Google Analytics at some stage.

Check out the video stats from our recent AFL Grand Final Twitter data visualisation to get an overview of what's on offer in the new youtube.com/analytics tool. As you can see we're certainly not a video production house and don't get millions of views but the AFL video was a nice spike for us - never had more than a hundred views before!

The data shows us that the majority of views originated in Australia and came mostly from males between 25-54 (surprise surprise). Interesting to see is that mobile was much bigger than anticipated with almost 25% of views. I really love the video retention reports though, they're are awesome to optimise your actual video content (and I hope more companies will start using this to improve their TV ads). In the case of our AFL video you can see that we have a fairly steady drop-off of total viewers during the video but compared to the average (which is great benchmarking data) are actually doing pretty well in getting viewers to watch the video to the very end. 

Read the YouTube analytics guide for a more detailed explanation of the various reports.

Google launched a neat new awesome service for you data geeks out there - the Google BigQuery Service. The new API is a web service that enables you to do interactive analysis of massively large datasets - up to billions of rows. 

Rapidly crunching terabytes of big data can lead to better business decisions, but this has traditionally required tremendous IT investments. Imagine a large online retailer that wants to provide better product recommendations by analyzing website usage and purchase patterns from millions of website visits. Or consider a car manufacturer that wants to maximize its advertising impact by learning how its last global campaign performed across billions of multimedia impressions.

All you Google Analytics fans out there should check out the new SEOMOZ blog post on how to pull real-time Google Analytics data into Google Docs.

Jamie has written a detailed step by step guide on how to use Google's Data Feed Query Explorer to extract raw data from any Google Analytics account in real-time and then pump it into a Google Doc. Once connected, you can create summary reports and simple dashboards right inside Google Docs and share them with your colleagues - cool!

Google just uploaded the videos from last year's Think Auto events in Sydney and Melbourne so I thought I'd share that with you. Check out the below recording including slides on how we think the automotive industry could crack cross-channel media attribution and finally give digital the credit (and budgets) it deserves.

The presentation covers basic media attribution best practice as well as some suggestions on how to track offline media responses online and link offline car sales back to online campaigns and website behaviour. Have a look, especially if you work in marketing in the automotive industry, as everyone seems to know how important digital is in the research process but no-one seems to be able to quantify exactly how much - here's a few ideas.