Beyond Basic Attribution - Review

Moving on to the 6th week of the growth marketing CXL program, attribution is in the center of the course's attention instructed by the very explanatory and interesting Russell McAthy. Attribution and in this case, marketing attribution is not only a number or in the numbers. It's more than a direct distribution of value. On the contrary, it's more consumer-centric than that since attribution should focus on understanding the consumers' behaviors, inclinations and decisions. As expected, B2B And B2C companies use marketing attribution much differently. The same goes for online and offline attribution even though offline marketing does give the direct insight you could get from the online sources.

Every company needs to find its own attribution model and load it with the right information in order to get the best possible data. This demands that teams should all be on the same page regarding the concept of attribution they have behind their working process. A couple of questions to keep in mind when deciding which attribution model you need to choose. How many times do you engage with consumers? How frequently do you do that? And above all which information will help you monitor your client base better in order to get more educated information in the future? Of course, there is no easy way to answer this question but I'll try to summarize attribution as best as possible.

Marching forward, Russell MacAthy continues by going through all the different attribution models accompanied by visual representations. The typically followed attribution is given to the last click that shows what happens before the conversion. However, if the last click is a direct source, then the last non-direct source gets the conversion award. This brings us to the first attribution model, the last non-direct click model. Especially if there is a less than 30 days intermission between the last visit and the conversion visit, then the last channel before the direct one scores the sale. Then, there is the last interaction model which gives the last interaction/click the full responsibility for the conversion. Of course, conversion attribution should not be given only in the last direct or non-direct visit since there may be a series of channels which all contributed to the conversion in some way. Thus, we have the linear attribution model which distributes value equally to every single channel that contributed to a conversion. Moreover, there is the time decay attribution model which attributes a conversion to all the interactions before the conversion progressively, for lower to higher. The last attribution model is the position based one which means that the first and last interactions are the ones getting the biggest share of the attribution pie since the first one shows interest in the brand and the last one helps seal the deal.

In order to understand more about conversions, you should pay attention to both macro and micro conversions. The macro ones include e-commerce sales and lead generation, as well as the micro ones, are composed by product view, add to basket actions and blog post views. There are also many tactics that marketing teams should be looking out for to find the suitable ones for their marketing purposes. Of course, there is CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) which aims at improves landing pages or any page in the journey of a user. Additionally, there is PPC (Pay per click) mostly through Google Ads, which is typically used by most companies. On the other side, SEO (technical, on or offsite) has the possibility to increase awareness and lead to improved decision-making around a brand. Most of the times, it also gets the shorter end of the stick when it comes to marketing attribution. In addition to this, the tactic of display offers a different dimension to performance. You can monitor which campaigns are viewed, how often and if you are showing them in the right regularity.

Obviously, we cannot overlook the affiliates which sometimes "steal" conversions from other channels and interactions with their discounts and vouchers even though they appear during the last phase of a conversion trip. They are different from the content affiliates who come earlier in the journey. Moving on, email as a tactic is useful since you should be monitoring the clicks on those emails to get insightful data from them. Then, you will be able to see the value of sending an email to your client base. The other kind of tactic that tends to be seen as more intruding is the direct mail one. They are uninvited like spam and possibly do not concern you at all. But what if you can check how those emails increase awareness as well as monitor the traffic that they bring about.

Apart from all the different tactics, channels and attribution models, there is also the strategic application around them. Marketeers should always take into consideration the customer's journey in order to find what attracts, convinces or makes them convert. If you focus on the audience, then segmenting them will give you better insight on the value of each audience group. On the way to discovering the best way to approach consumers, it's important to monitor the people's awareness of your brand and your products in order to see how they rank in comparison to competitors' brand and products. However, approaching consumers does not mean that their personal data should be available. On the contrary, only their shopping behaviors should be monitored only to contribute to their journey's understanding.

On the whole, diving in the world of attribution with the help of Russell McAthy assisted me a lot to put channels, interactions and the concept of attribution into perspective. The better you train your attribution model, the more educated your decisions will be based on the data you study. Even though I do not have the technical expertise to build background things in Google Analytics, I still can work on the methodology and the ways that interactions and clicks should be viewed in order to bring better business results.