Simply put, attribution is a way to assign credit for sales or leads back to the initial marketing activities that drove it. It’s one of the most important things you can do when determining your marketing budgets and reporting the effectiveness of campaigns, channels, and content.
Back in 2012, Google conducted a study that analyzed 3,000 purchase journeys across the auto, CPG, finance, and tech industries. Their results found that no two journeys were the same! Combine that with other studies showing that it takes up to seven exposures of a brand before a user will buy, and you can see why crediting each of those exposures can be vital.
For example, imagine you’re being asked to give credit for a marketing result, such as a form fill, asset download, or even a purchase. How can you get a holistic picture of what drove that conversion, to better understand how all of your campaigns, channels, and efforts worked together to drive your customer through the funnel? Attribution.
There are six basic attribution models, each assigning credit to different parts of a user’s journey:
Last Touch
Linear
First Touch
U-Shaped
Ramp
CustomHow do you know which attribution model is right for your business? Ideally, you would have a custom machine learning model: that is, an algorithm that looks at your last rolling 30 days worth of sales and makes a value judgment about which channels and touchpoints were most effective. But, the tools capable of a model like that can be expensive.
Fortunately, there are some cost-effective ways to build a custom attribution model in various analytics and social media tools.
Having attribution data is only one piece of the puzzle. Knowing what to do with it is critical. There are loads of different tests you can run to put the data to work for you, but here are a few ideas to get you started:
We know that what we’ve covered so far is just the tip of the iceberg. The additional resources below contain more information on attribution, the tools to use, and how to apply it across everything you do in digital.
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Attribution, simply put, is a way to assign credit for sales or leads back to the initial marketing activities that drove it. An attribution model is a way of assigning more or less credit to a marketing campaign, content, or channel depending on where in a customer’s journey they encountered it. To demonstrate how attribution...
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