How Machine Learning Can Finally Solve “(direct)/(none)”
Urchin, later acquired by Google, invented an amazing way of measuring campaign performance by using last non-direct click attribution and first-party cookies. The solution was perfect—for earlier times:
- People used mostly one device.
- Smartphones were rare.
- Advertisers avoided mobile apps and browsers because user experience was, at that time, horrible.
In most cases, the assumption that users converted on the same browser and the same device as their first site visit was fair.
