Getting Started with Marketing Attribution
Getting Started with Marketing Attribution
Know Where Your Customers Come From
Marketing attribution is how marketers can “give credit” to each of the various parts of getting a customer to make a purchase.
Attribution allows businesses to track and measure the effectiveness of their various marketing efforts individually.
For any team maintaining more than one touchpoint1 at a time (probably you), attribution shows which parts of a customer journey most influence customer behavior.
By understanding the impact of each touchpoint in the customer journey, you can ensure that you understand how the various winners and losers in your campaign portfolio are performing well, and which ones to drop.
Why You Need Attribution
Many life lessons can be pulled from the classic “The Odyssey”, and an understanding of effective attribution is no different.
Read on to see how blinded giants and marketing departments are surprisingly similar.
Polyphemus: "…[T]ell me your name, here and now—I would like to make you a gift that will please you."
Odysseus: "My name is Nobody. That is what I am called by my mother and father and by all my friends."
When Polyphemus falls into a drunken slumber, Oysseus drives a burning stake into the Cyclops' only eye.
Polyphemus yells to the other Cyclops: "Oh my friends, it is Nobody's treachery, not violence, that is doing me to death."
"Well then," the others answer as they walk away from Polyphemus' cave. "If you are alone and nobody is assaulting you, you must be sick and sicknesses come from almighty Zeus and cannot be helped.”
Polyphemus failed to correctly attribute his pain to Odysseus.
By failing to qualify (or disqualify) the information given to him in an interaction, Polyphemus is unable to correctly act on it later.
Polyphemus intends to call the other cyclops2 to action and to his defense by describing the one who blinded him in his message.
However, by regurgitating exactly what he heard from Odysseus, Polyphemus does the human cyclops equivalent of emailing “Dear {{firstname}}”
In summary, marketing attribution is important to ensure that you understand who your customers actually are and how they got to you.
Without understanding the path to purchase, improving the customer experience will be hit-or-miss every time.
If you need a primer on what kinds of information you might need from your customers to know who they are, check out my previous article article.
Choosing Marketing Attribution Models
Now that you know why it’s important to consider marketing attribution models, let’s jump into how to get started.
To implement effective marketing attribution, businesses need to develop and utilize attribution models relevant to their particular business.
These models help assign credit to each marketing touchpoint based on its contribution to the customer's decision-making process.
Although the selection of your particular model will depend on your needs, it’s useful to start by trying out a few of the popular models.
Below are some of the most common marketing attribution models3:
Single-Touch Attribution (STA): This kind of attribution gives 100% of the attribution credit to 1 part of the customer journey. There are two common kinds of STA, First- and Last-Touch
First Touch: This model attributes all the credit to the first touchpoint a customer interacts with. It is useful for understanding which channels are driving initial awareness and interest in a product or service.
Last Touch4: Opposite of First Touch, the last-touch attribution model assigns all credit to the final touchpoint before a conversion occurs.5 It helps identify the channels that directly lead to a sale or conversion.
Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA): This kind of attribution spreads the attribution credit across multiple parts of the customer journey. There are many kinds of MTA, but I’ll cover 5 common ones here.
Linear Attribution: In the linear attribution model, credit is equally divided among all touchpoints. It offers a balanced approach, acknowledging the role of each touchpoint in the customer journey.
Time Decay Attribution: This model assigns more credit to touchpoints closer to the conversion and less to those that occurred earlier in the customer journey. It recognizes that touchpoints closer to the conversion are usually more influential.
Position-Based Attribution (AKA U-Shaped6): The position-based attribution model (also called U-shaped) distributes conversion credit heavily between the first & last touches, and the remainder evenly between all intermediate steps. According to AgencyAnalytics, a common split is 80% between first and last, and 20% between all others.
Custom Attribution: If none of the above methods work for your business, try assigning credit to touchpoints based on the considerations for your business. Maybe your product is mostly sold based on general brand awareness (think Oreos) instead of through direct digital conversion. A customized reverse Time Decay Attribution model might be more appropriate to accurately describe the customer’s decision to buy.
For another great look into marketing attribution models, check out this article from AgencyAnalytics
An Example
Imagine you’re a power washing company using a First-Touch model.
If a prospective customer looks up Bournemouth Power Washing Services and clicks on your paid search listing, then the Google paid search listing gets all of the credit for any conversion after that interaction.
In the First-Touch attribution model, it doesn’t matter if this customer later watched one of your business’ YouTube videos7 and clicked on a link to your website through the video description to finally book a service.
In this model, Google will still get 100% of the credit.
Obviously, in this example, going with a single touch attribution model might distort your understanding of the customer journey, so a multi-touch model might be more appropriate.
Choosing the right attribution model depends on your business goals, the complexity of your marketing channels, and the nature of your product or service. It's essential to experiment with different models, analyze their impact, and iterate accordingly.
Implementing an Attribution Model
Luckily for wallets and the bottom line, implementing an attribution model can start out as low cost as needed for a business.
As customer journey data is produced through whatever existing tech stack you have (think UTM tracking, email pixel firings, etc), compare your customer journey results to the actions taken by the customer.
For simple models, this can be managed in a spreadsheet where rows are manually copy-pasted as data is produced.
However, for MTA or larger data throughputs, a dedicated system for managing marketing performance and attribution is often the best solution.
Most marketing analytics tools enable accurate data collection, attribution modeling, and performance analysis within their existing tools. Google Analytics, for example, provides valuable insights into the performance of marketing channels and campaigns. You can implement your chosen marketing attribution model into the tool and let it run with the rest of your tech stack.
Keep as much data as you (reasonably) can regarding the processes and systems used for analytics here so that you can run backtesting and retroactive analysis to estimate how future changes will affect customer behavior.
In addition to attribution models and analytics tools, it's crucial to establish clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each marketing campaign and success benchmarks before releasing that campaign. Defining measurable objectives allows you to track progress and evaluate the success of your efforts accurately.
In conclusion, marketing attribution is a fundamental aspect of campaign success measurement.
You need to know what you’re measuring to know how to act on the information.
By implementing effective attribution models and utilizing analytics tools, businesses can gain valuable insights into their marketing performance, optimize their strategies, and achieve higher ROI.
Understanding the importance of marketing attribution and taking proactive steps to implement it will give you a clearer idea of how your customers are actually interacting with your company and what you can do to improve the bottom line.
or
In this case, a touchpoint could be anything that they interact with. Examples are: Google paid search ads, instagram ads, company website, emails, promo codes from letters at checkout
I re-wrote this sentence probably a dozen times. None of the plurals I found for cyclops look right, and apparently that’s a common problem. Check out this article to see other peoples’ confusion at the plural: How To Pluralize Cyclops
For the scope of this article, I’m only focusing on digital marketing attribution. For physical or other non-digital channels, expect a future article to deal with them
This is the easiest model to work with, and so is often the default for most tools
A common subset of the Last Touch model is the Last Click model which assigns credit to the last active interaction that. Check out this article for more information: Why First-Touch and Last-Touch Attribution Are Out of Style
Other shapes can be substituted here, such as W-shaped Attribution. The goal is to best weight touchpoints as you find they affect YOUR customer journey. What works for others may not be appropriate for you.
I am amazed at how popular these kinds of videos are. People are paying (through ad revenue) to watch advertisements for a company’s offering. Props to the owners of Bournemouth Jet Washing