Marketing Attribution | CXL Institute Foundation Program Course Review

Learn how attribution makes your marketing work.

“Attribution” course?is part of the?CXL Institute Foundations Program and?It is the first one from the "Marketing 101" section. The instructor of this course is?Russell McAthy?from?Ringside Data. It will take you around two hours 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 behaviour to drive value for organizations moving?forward.

If you would rather like to listen to Russel McAhty talks about attribution, here is his presentation during CXL Elite Camp 2019

What is Marketing Attribution. In a few words, Marketing attribution is the process through which we analyse and determine which marketing tactics are resulting in sales and conversion.

Attribution is around understanding the consumer. Now, what we mean by that is we, as marketers, we need to understand the performance of our activities. This isn't just about understanding people who have purchased or have created leads with our organizations. Consumers in the context that we're going to be talking about today is everyone. A customer is someone who's already bought. So, we need to understand the full journey and the full value of the way that the consumer engages with the brand. And that is the truth in what attribution is for companies today.

What is a conversion?

Now in some instances when we're talking about e-commerce that will be someone purchasing a basket. In leads, it might just be that someone has signed up to a form. For some businesses, it could just be that they've read a number of articles. All of these things are conversions that have some monetary value to organizations and that is what we mean when we talk about a conversion. Attributing throughout a consumer journey has to have an end point. And so, what we're going to be calling a conversion today is that end point.

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 key thing that you need to know is that, when it comes to analytics, people and resource is the most important thing. “Can your company allocate its resources to attribution?”?might be the right question.

Attribution models

An Attribution models are the different technical elements required for you to do attribution and how your company decides to assign credit to touchpoints in sales.

The first model presented is the last non-direct click, in which the conversion cost is attributed to the last non-direct source. It is a basic one, that considers that the user had previous contact with the brand or product and then directly accessed the site to finish the purchase or sign up.

The next model is the last interaction attribution, which considers the last touchpoint as the responsible for the conversion. This one, as explained, is good for short-time conversions and to track PPC conversions, for instance. However, it is not good to take into account the display and SEO influences on the user's behaviour.

Those first two models aren't good to comprehensively understand the entire journey. Russel then goes on to present other options that aim to tackle this issue.

The Linear attribution, for instance, is where you distribute the value through every interaction equally. The Time Decay Attribution, on the other hand, considers that the closer the touchpoint is to the final interaction, the higher the value it must have. So, the conversion value is distributed among the touchpoints, scaling up as it gets closer to the last one.

Then, the professor introduces the Position-based attribution, also known as the bathtub model,?in which the highest values are attributed to the first touchpoint - where the user got to know the brand - and the last one, which triggered the conversion. This was popularized by Google Analytics as being the most accurate.

Finally, he wraps up the models by claiming that algorithmic model or machine learning model is what everyone should be using, taking into account a variety of elements to come up with an accurate picture of the user's behaviour.

What Data Is?Needed

The first thing you need for an attribution solution is web analytics data. Google Analytics has its own attribution section because it has all of the marketing analytics data there in the first place. Adobe has their own analytics package, as does a number of others. 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.

Attribution Tactics

The next classes are focus on tactical. This is where we're going to go through individual practices such as CRO or actual individual channels PPC, SEO, display and see how attribution is used for them.

For CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization, you can use attribution to understand whether the landing/offer page had indeed the most of the influence on the customer. It is possible, for instance, to identify whether different offers interact among themselves and what offers to invest in.

For PPC, attribution is a powerful tool within PPC. So the first thing to address is that when we talk about this, typically we're talking about Google Ads, and Google Ads has its own attribution models within the platform. Here you can use attribution to understand whether the landing/offer page is set up to give the user what they want.

For Display and SEO, attribution should consider the role both of them play to convert the user. As it relates to display, you must consider that the click rates will be indeed very low, but the impression could be impacting your user, prompting here to convert in the future.

When it comes to SEO, you can have your user engaging with content on your website that will be indoctrinating them to convert in the future as well.

For affiliates, the professor demonstrates that you can often overlook those who contribute to introduce your brand to the customers. He alerts that your company could be making a wonderful work convincing the client to convert, just to have an affiliate at the end of the funnel, offering a discount coupon that will close the deal. Thus, it is important to use attribution to correctly evaluate and reward your affiliate efforts.

For email and direct email, it is possible to use attribution to track whether an email content contributed to advance the customer through the journey. Russel advises marketers to consider not only the pages that are visited by a user but the emails they read before converting.

Finally, for TV, you can use attribution in an aggregate form to overlay the TV audience data over the digital behaviour, tracking whether an advertisement affected your users.

Marketing Attribution Strategies

Finished the tactical section, the professor goes on to talk about the strategic application of attribution.

The first and most clear one is the customer journey analysis. Russel talks about is the visualizing the consumer journey. Instead of just thinking about the myriad of touchpoints (model) a user can have, the main focus here should be how to reduce the journey and make the user convert as soon as possible. To achieve this, Russel introduces the concept of "Next Best Action". Which prompts the marketing strategist to think about the direct next thing it should be made to enhance the user journey.

Finally, attribution is also useful when you want to evaluate the value of a brand or analyse the customer's lifetime value.

Closing

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

Attribution can help drive value for your organization, but the question is, can your company allocate its resources to attribution?

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