• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 6, 2014

Google has acquired Adometry, which specializes in online advertising attribution, to help advertisers better understand the conversion impact of cross-channel and multiscreen campaigns.

Adometry has been pushing to help marketers understand cross-channel and multiscreen attribution. While Google has been working to improve ad measurements, Adometry has been working on running algorithms over massive data sets to determine how offline and online marketing points contribute to the ultimate sale.

The company's employees will work with a Google Analytics Premium team to offer attribution solutions, explains Paul Pellman, Adometry founder. For now, the company remains a stand-alone business.

James Green, Magnetic CEO, said the company partnered with Adometry to gain access to attribution signals and can optimize based on the fractional attribution signal, rather than last click, post view, and more. "I'm thrilled for Google because its attribution product offering was never completely unbiased," he said.

The acquisition gives Google a "demonstrably fair" product they can offer clients, and at the same time they will learn from the attribution signal that will help their own products, Green said. Excited by the news, he predicts Google will eventually rename Adometry Google Attribution, based on "zero facts or inside information," but it will become a rich source of data and learning for Google and its clients.

Despite attribution that provides direction as to where marketers should make campaign investments, the model is not without challenges. Adometry released a study with Econsultancy last month analyzing marketing attribution adoption rates and challenges. While most marketers recognize that the last-click or simple click-through method of measuring attribution no longer works, few know how to work through the challenges to adopt practices that do.

Many challenges that marketers encounter stem from having too much data. Attribution requires lots of data, multiple channels, many types of people and responsibilities within an organization, and even several types of conversion. Marketers need to know the data to use and how to apply it. Seasonal events can impact the data, and discovering discrepancies and crunching the data in real-time becomes critical.

Microsoft also has pushed for several years to solve the problem of attribution. The model has been slowly adopted by the online advertising industry, which also has worked to bring in offline signals and equate them to in-store and online sales.

Adometry's roots are in detection and fraud prevention. In 2011, the company was acquired by fraud detection tech company Click Forensics, and took its name. Google also acquired London-based Spider.io in February.