Nielsen, JD.com Cooperate on MTA Launch in China

Nielsen, leading global measurement and data analytics company, has announced a strategic cooperation agreement with Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com formalising the collaborative launch of a Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) offering in China. MTA solutions help marketers assess the sales impact of advertising and marketing investments across media platforms.

As part of this collaboration, Nielsen and JD.com will jointly market the MTA offering to help marketers better determine the effectiveness and return on investment (ROI) of ads both in and outside of JD.com.

Executives of both JD.com and Nielsen unveiled the MTA solutions at the joint forum.

A "first of its kind" solution in China, this joint effort will leverage anonymised data from JD.com's cloud platform and their 236.5 million active users, along with Nielsen's digital media monitoring data and analytics expertise. The joint offering will help advertisers more efficiently allocate advertising and marketing budgets to increase their ROI.

Digital media spend now exceeds that of traditional media, and the increase in digital marketing investments has brought added complexity. Consumers are regularly exposed to multiple media touch points across different devices and platforms during the path to purchase, making it nearly impossible for marketers to comprehensively measure the effectiveness of their investments. Until now, a typical approach for measuring digital marketing performance has been to attribute a sale to the consumer's last advertising exposure or touch point before a purchase. Though this approach might offer insight into the final steps of a consumer's path to purchase, it disregards countless previous touch points throughout the online shopping journey.

"The increased fragmentation of online media has created a landscape where consumers are seeing and clicking on hundreds of touch points before they make a purchase. For brands who are trying to measure and optimise their online marketing ROI, this is a massive problem that previous analytics platforms have been unable to solve effectively," said Vishal Bali, managing director of Nielsen China. "Instead of looking at just that last click before purchase, the Nielsen-JD.com MTA offering allows us to track the full online shopping path and then leverage the most effective touch points for better engagement with the consumer."

Yan Weipeng, vice president of JD.com, said, "Under the common goal of maximising marketing efficiency and sales of manufacturers and brands, JD's collaboration with Nielsen is a win-win solution. MTA promotes a thorough view of the omnichannel environment, while encouraging creative business models to provide door opening advertising services to consumers. This is the first of many steps in digital marketing that leverages Big Data to help brands focus their investment on the most appropriate factors.”