Attribution | CXL Course Review

Understand consumer behavior to make better decisions

“Attribution” course is part of the CXL Digital Analytics Minidegree Program. The instructor of this course is Russell McAthy from Ringside Data. It will take around two hours of your time to go through 21 brief lessons and learn all about attribution.

The main goal of the Attribution course is to help you understand what data you have and how to understand consumer behavior to drive value for organizations moving forward.

If you would rather listen to Russel McAhty talks about attribution, here is his fantastic talk on the CXL Elite Camp 2019:

What is marketing attribution?

Understanding attribution means understanding the context behind the data you are gathering. Attribution is:

1. recognizing the customer journey,
2. measuring how individuals learn about your organization, and then
3. making strategic decisions about how to attract more leads or customers.

The basic mistake is taking attribution for yet another metric. Attributing things properly means understanding your customer.

Do you need an attribution?

One of the things that you should definitely take care of is what do you want to get from attribution. A lot of brands don’t actually understand how their consumers engage with them. They look at what Google Analytics or Adobe analytics shows them. But what they don’t understand is what that consumer thinks as they go through that journey.

We see insights into this when you look at conversion optimization, and you start focusing on an individual’s interactions on a singular page. Attribution breaks that out and understands that individual’s interactions throughout their entire journey.

The problem with tracking and properly attributing every touchpoint might not be collecting the data, but having people with the skills needed to do the job adequately. “Can your company allocate its resources to attribution?” might be a more suitable question.

Attribution models

An attribution model is how your company decides to assign credit to touchpoints in sales.

Let’s break down types of marketing attribution models:

First click attribution

Revenue generated from the sale will be attributed to the very first channel or campaign the customer interacted with.

Last click / Last interaction attribution

Revenue generated from the sale will be attributed to the very last channel the customer interacted with before making a purchase. The last interaction doesn’t necessarily have to be digital, and because of that is more appropriate to call it “last interaction” instead of the “last click”.

Last non-direct click attribution

Revenue generated from the sale will be attributed to the last channel the visitor engaged with, excluding any direct traffic.

Google Analytics, Google Ads, and several different platforms will not give the credit of conversion to direct click, even though direct was the visit that drove the sale.

Linear attribution

Revenue generated from the sale will be distributed evenly across all of the touchpoints in the customer’s journey.

This model doesn’t show the marketer what campaigns and what channels impacted a user.

Time decay attribution

Revenue generated from the sale will be distributed across all of the touchpoints in the customer’s journey, but the later touchpoints will receive a higher percentage of credit than the earlier ones.

Position based (U-shaped) attribution

Revenue generated from the sale will be attributed to the first anonymous touchpoint that initiated the visitor and the lead conversion touchpoint. This attribution tracks every single touchpoint, but it will assign 40% to the first and the last click; the remaining 20% will be split among the other touchpoints.

The first time you engage with a brand means that this is how you found out about this company. And (…) the last interaction is where you converted and therefore everything in the middle has a significantly lower value.

W-shaped attribution

Revenue generated from the sale will be attributed to the first and the last touchpoints, and also to the mid-funnel touchpoint. The remaining credit will be split evenly between any remaining touchpoints.

What Data Is Needed

Before diving into attribution, you should choose which data would you use. To choose the data source, you will have to know what is that you want to track in the first place. Will that be “Macro conversions” only (e-commerce sale, lead generation, etc.) or also “Micro conversions” (product view, “add to basket”, blog post view, etc.)? Sadly, most of the brands tend to forget about the latter one.

For some brands, there might be 50 or even 100 micro conversions on a website. Each can be the reason why some of your visitors became customers, but also why some of them choose not to buy. How deep will you go to track down those micro-conversions is up to your (marketing) team to decide.

Tactics

How to chose which attribution model will you use? Finding the best model will certainly take some time. There is no need for choosing the model blindly, though. Understanding what attribution means for each marketing strategy will help you decide which attribution model to try first.

To keep this post as short and concise as possible, I will write about choosing an attribution model for SEO and PPC only.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization has three pillars: on-site, off-site, and technical. From the consumer’s point of view, however, there is no difference between those three. Consumers will either find you or not.

When we talk about SEO from an attribution perspective, we’re looking at the impact that has on the consumer journey and their decision-making.

First, you will want to know what is it that they are looking at. The second thing you should seek to interpret is the concept of their perception before they arrive at the website. To put simply: 1. Landing pages, 2. Keywords (long-tail keywords especially).

It is important to understand what keywords push users to your web site and at what stage in the customer journey are they when arriving at your web site.

By optimizing a website with tailored content for users (customers) based on their place in the customer journey you will help them get what they want, further convincing them on the way to a purchase.

PPC

Pay-per-click campaigns will typically use either last-click or last non-direct click attribution model. But attribution is not the same for shorter customer journeys and those with a longer buying cycle.

The question that can come in handy here is whether are macro conversions or micro conversions occurring. Your PPC campaign can lead to either conversion type, but it is important to attribute correctly based upon the importance it has to your business.

Closing

Attribution means understanding the customer journey, measuring how individuals learn about your organization and then making strategic decisions about how to attract more leads or customers.

Understanding what attribution means for each marketing strategy will help you decide which attribution model to chose.