Branch rolls out a new ‘people-based’ attribution engine

In the days before mobile apps, it was fairly easy to attribute clicks and conversions back to a user’s interaction. But apps do not use the same tracking technology, leaving mobile marketers a few steps behind.

Branch’s new attribution engine overcomes those marketing challenges while making for a better overall customer experience, CEO and co-founder Alex Austin told me.

“You can’t solve for attribution without solving for the customer experience,” Austin said.

Branch’s core technology provides linking infrastructures for many mobile brands that ensure a seamless experience for customers using a web browser, app or social platform. The new attribution engine is powered by an extensive identity graph that Austin says holds at least some data from almost every smartphone user in the country.

Screen shot of Branch’s dashboard

“If a user clicks on a link in Safari and then an app, we pair the cookie from Safari to the advertising ID in the app. Because of the graph we built, we can connect across all the different silos to give a consumer journey across all these different touch points,” Austin said. “We created a giant anonymized graph that allows us to tie back to put together the fragmented identities.”

Austin said that prior to using the graph, marketers often misattributed customer actions, wasting time and money.

“We can attribute up to 30 percent more conversion events back to a campaign, over fingerprint-based or cookie-based methods,” he said.

Austin stresses that although their graph contains a huge amount of customer data, it is not personally identifiable information (PII).

“We’ve always thought privacy first. We’ve taken a lot of effort to make sure it’s not PII. We actively purge any connection that will help to tie back to the individual. No one can download anything. It’s only used to make the connection,” Austin said. “We are representing the future of attribution.”