In today’s digital age, businesses rely heavily on marketing strategies to reach their target audience and drive growth. With the advent of sophisticated analytics tools and data-driven approaches, the concept of marketing attribution has gained immense significance. Marketing attribution refers to the process of identifying and assigning value to the various touchpoints that contribute to a customer’s journey, ultimately leading to a desired outcome. Much like a goal in football, there is often more than one ‘player’ that has contributed to the successful outcome. Marketing attribution is a bit like looking at every player who touched the ball in the lead up to a goal and deciding how much credit to give each of them. A more marketing focussed example of this would be assigning a value to the website visit, social interaction and ad click of an individual prospect who converted on your website, allowing you to establish which of those touchpoints influenced the lead the most.
By understanding the effectiveness of different marketing channels and tactics, organizations can make informed decisions and optimize their marketing efforts. In this article, we delve into the world of marketing attribution, exploring its benefits, methods, and challenges.
Methods of Marketing Attribution
Let’s start with some definitions. In the world of marketing attribution there are three basic ways of defining how you want to treat the various touchpoints in a customer journey. They are:
1. First-Touch Attribution: This method attributes the entire value of a conversion to the first touchpoint a customer interacts with. It gives credit to the initial marketing effort that grabs the customer’s attention and introduces them to the brand. While simple to implement, first-touch attribution overlooks the impact of subsequent touchpoints.
2. Last-Touch Attribution: In this method, the last touchpoint before a conversion receives full credit for the sale or conversion. It focuses on the final marketing effort that leads to a customer’s decision to take an action such as submitting a form on your website. While straightforward, last-touch attribution ignores the contributions of earlier touchpoints.
3. Multi-Touch Attribution: This approach considers the entire customer journey, assigning value to multiple touchpoints based on their influence on the conversion. Multi-touch attribution uses various models, such as linear, time decay, and U-shaped, to distribute credit across touchpoints. These models offer a more comprehensive view of the customer journey, considering the impact of each touchpoint in the decision-making process.
The Benefits of Marketing Attribution
So you understand the different attribution methods, but what actually are the benefits of using marketing attribution? By assigning value to each of the touchpoints in a customer journey you are able to make better decisions on where to place future budget and resource. If you notice that the majority of conversions come from users who click on a Google search ad followed by an interaction with your email newsletter you will want to keep investing in those two channels. Without marketing attribution you would be none the wiser as to what that user journey looks like, and would likely think that the lead was the sole result of your email newsletter.
The attribution model that you choose will change how you view things, so it’s not always a straightforward process and is something you’re likely to revisit over time. However, with marketing attribution in place you are giving yourself the best chance of understanding how each channel is contributing to the success of your overall marketing efforts.
Challenges of Marketing Attribution
Accurate attribution requires access to comprehensive and reliable data. The strength of your tech stack – and the attribution technology within it – can result in differing views on which channels are contributing to your marketing success. Not only that, but even with advanced marketing attribution technology in place the platform you use will not be able to collect all of the data required and some assumptions will be built into their attribution model. Whilst it’s not possible to get a 100% accurate picture of how your customers engage with your brand before converting to sales or leads, it is still better to be trying to make sense of the data you do have, enabling you to make incremental improvements in your campaign performance and return on investment.
Simon Plews