If you’re just getting started with the process of buying advertising programmatically, know that it doesn’t have to be all on your shoulders.

Running advertising campaigns with fully managed providers puts the campaign responsibilities in the hands of media strategists. The media strategists are the ones who upload everything needed, make optimizations throughout, and send reporting back to the marketer. This is a more appealing option for teams that are just getting started with programmatic advertising and don’t yet have the resources to take these processes in-house.

As a marketer, whether it’s done through a managed service or a self-service platform, programmatic advertising is the future when it comes to executing display advertising campaigns. However, deciding how to run these ads is entirely up to the marketer and their company or agency. Whatever the needs may be, there is an option for everyone.

The short answer: Attribution

Attribution is critical because it allows you to evaluate what ads or digital advertising efforts are driving results and measure your impact. Yearly trends continue to show that marketers (and their bosses) are placing more and more importance on marketing analytics and attribution.

Performance Marketing Association’s recent State of Performance Marketing Report found that almost 75 percent of marketers believe attribution is critical or very important to marketing success. Despite this influx of interest, many marketers continue to track CPA, CPC, or other metrics to measure their campaigns exclusively. Tracking these digital advertising metrics alone completely misses a large portion of your audience—those who don’t click on ads, but may still be influenced to convert later.

Disadvantages of last click

• A small portion of people click on ads: Only 16 percent of users click on ads, and half of those—8 percent— account for 85 percent of all clicks on display ads.

• Last-click tracking incentives finding users who would buy without advertising: Last-click attribution models are fundamentally incentivized to find users already likely to purchase.

• Credit is not accurately assigned across publishers: Last-click gives all the credit to the last click and ignores any other marketing that occurred before the purchase. This means any previous messaging users were exposed to, in addition to any content they consumed that discussed your brand, isn’t appropriately valued.

In fact, in the same survey, almost 65 percent of respondents said that they currently employ a click-based attribution model. However, over 90 percent of them said that they plan to or are considering changing their attribution model in 2017, signifying a large shift away from click-based attribution in the coming year.

Unlike click-based attribution models, blended attribution allows you to take into account both views and clicks when measuring the success of your digital advertising campaigns. This digital advertising metric retains the simplicity and immediacy of click-based attribution while accounting for the cumulative effect of views. More importantly, it takes into account what we have always known—that viewing ads influences consumer behavior.