I’ll give you one example: In the past, when a customer made an order via last-click measurement, we would give all the credit to one particular affiliate publisher. But when we built our own multi-touch attribution (MTA) solution, we learned that some of that credit went to other affiliates, some of it went to other marketing channels, and some of that credit was attributed to our estimated baseline propensity of the customer to shop with us anyway, independent of marketing. Essentially, there was only a tiny slice of credit that was actually deemed incremental.
"estimated baseline propensity of the customer to shop with us anyway"
Code for deleted affiliate cookies and slippage.
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Judgment becomes even more important when we consider the shifting landscape around things such as cookies and their impact on our ability to collect a complete picture of marketing activity.
^ As in they ("around things such as cookies") don't work well.
Google wants to be the only salesman (sell ads!) they don't really want affiliates in the better SERPs (anymore).
I am not that gullible anymore
