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Can you de-duplicate a person across OOH, display, and social?

Why there is no user-level path across channels, what halo effect and causal lift answer instead, and which impression metrics are safe to compare.

Written by Zachary Cuva

No. AdQuick does not run multi-touch attribution and will refer partners for it. What exists instead is halo effect and lift modeling, which answer the cross-channel question at market level rather than at person level.


What is not possible

Following one consumer from a billboard to a display impression to a purchase, and assigning fractional credit across those touches. That is multi-touch attribution, and it is not something AdQuick does in house.

The dashboard is single-touch attribution with no lift component. A pre-campaign baseline with predicted-versus-actual is not in it today; the web lift tool is still being built.

Passing your internal user IDs into the pixel and getting them back matched to converting devices, so that you can credit OOH inside your own systems, is not supported. The only join key is the mobile ad ID, and only converting mobile ad IDs come back.


What to use instead

Halo effect, for whether OOH improved your other channels' performance. Causal lift, for whether the channel produced incremental business. Both work at market level and neither requires user identity.

For genuine cross-channel modeling, media mix modeling with a specialist partner. Exposure data makes a good input to it, better than planned impressions, because planned impressions are an estimate that cannot see anomalous days.


The comparison trap

Do not put exposed device counts next to your digital impressions and treat them as like-for-like. Exposure data is opt-in and partial, then up-sampled. Agree which metric family you are comparing before you compare anything: booked impressions, weighted impressions, and up-sampled exposures are three different series.

Counting OOH conversions against digital conversions is not like-for-like either, because the coverage underneath the two numbers is completely different.


Common misconceptions

Myth: OOH conversions can be compared directly against digital conversions.

Reality: The underlying coverage differs. Use delivered impressions for a like-for-like comparison.

Myth: Exposed device counts are an impressions estimate.

Reality: They are up-sampled panel captures read as real world activity, not an impressions figure.

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