Attribution Overview

Imagine you’re a detective trying to solve a mystery. You have a bunch of clues, but you need to figure out which clues are most important for solving the case.

In the world of digital marketing, the "case" is figuring out which marketing efforts are driving the most success for your business. This is where attribution comes in.

What is Attribution?

Attribution is like giving credit where credit is due. It helps businesses understand which of their marketing activities are most effective at leading customers to take a desired action—like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. In Adobe Analytics, attribution is a way to track and measure the impact of various marketing touchpoints on customer behavior.

Why is Attribution Important?

Imagine you see an ad on social media, then receive an email, and later visit the company’s website. If you end up making a purchase, which of these touchpoints should get the credit for your decision?

Attribution helps answer this question by assigning value to each touchpoint based on its role in the customer journey.

Examples to Illustrate Attribution

The Path to Purchase:

• Scenario: Poornima sees a Facebook ad, clicks on it, then receives a follow-up email with a discount offer, and finally makes a purchase from the website.
• Attribution Insight: Attribution helps determine how much influence each of these touchpoints (the Facebook ad and the email) had on Poornima's decision to buy.

Evaluating Marketing Channels:

• Scenario: A company runs ads on Google, Facebook, and Instagram. They want to know which channel is bringing in the most valuable customers.
• Attribution Insight: With attribution, the company can see which ads are more effective at driving customer actions and optimize their marketing budget accordingly.

In short, Attribution allows analysts to tailor how different dimension items receive credit for successful outcomes.

How does Adobe Analytics enhance Attribution?

Adobe Analytics enhances attribution by letting you:

• Define attribution beyond paid media: Any dimension, metric, channel or event can be applied to models (e.g. internal search), not just marketing campaigns.
• Utilize unlimited attribution model comparison: dynamically compare as many models as you want.
• Avoid implementation changes: With report time processing and context-aware sessions, customer journey context can be built in and applied at run time.
• Construct the session that best matches your attribution scenario.
• Break down attribution by segments: Easily compare the performance of your marketing channels across any important segment (e.g. New vs. Repeat customers, Product X vs. Product Y, Loyalty level or CLV).
• Inspect channel cross-over and multi-touch analysis: Use Venn Diagrams and Histograms, and trend attribution results.
• Analyze key marketing sequences visually: explore paths that led to conversion visually with multi-node flow and fallout visualizations.
• Build calculated metrics: use any number of attribution allocation methods.

What are Attribution Models and their lookback windows?

Attribution models in Adobe Analytics are frameworks that determine how credit for a conversion or successful event is distributed across different marketing touchpoints in a customer’s journey.

These models help businesses understand which marketing activities are most influential in leading to desired outcomes, like purchases or sign-ups.

A lookback window is the time period during which touchpoints are considered when attributing credit for a conversion. It defines how far back in time you look to assign credit to marketing activities.

• Default Lookback Window: Adobe Analytics often uses a default lookback window, such as 30 days, to capture touchpoints that led up to a conversion within that timeframe.
• Custom Lookback Window: Analysts can adjust the lookback window based on their specific needs or business goals. For instance, you might set a 7-day lookback window to focus on more recent interactions or a 90-day window to capture longer customer journeys.

In the next post, we will deep-dive into the types of Attribution Models that Adobe offers along with their Lookback windows to understand how analysts can uncover the tremendous treasure of insights hidden in this concept!

Also, don't forget to read this amazing post by Jeff Bloomer on Attribution Panel and Lookback windows.

Reference Articles:

1. Attribution Overview
2. Attribution Models & Lookback Window