Marketing Attribution, What it is, Attribution Models and What data is needed .

In today’s article I’m going to be talking about, marketing attribution, attribution models and what data is needed for attribution.

What is Marketing Attribution?

It’s important to note that attribution is a term that can mean many different things for example when it comes to images, it actually just means attributing the value of that image to the right person. Attribution is also not the distribution of value, it is not just another number that you can put into a spreadsheet. But in the context of marketing as a whole, attribution is understanding the context behind the data that we are able to get. Attribution is about understanding the consumer. As a marketer, you need to understand the performance of your activities when you go and run a campaign or change a landing page. You have to put performance in the context of everything that goes on around what marketing is. It isn't just about understanding people who have purchased or have created leads with your organizations. A customer is someone who has 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 really the truth in what attribution is for companies today.

Attribution is not just online!

Attribution is not just online because marketing is not just online. Attribution is still required to understand the performance of traditional marketing activities like marketing in print, TV, radio, out of home.

one of the difficulties in the data capture process is that we are used to, as digital people, being able to see everything when it comes to the data that is available for marketers. We are able to see every single visit, every single sale and every single interaction and being able to say who did that and when they did that. In the offline world, that is significantly more difficult.TV for example, you're almost not able to say that individuals saw that TV ad before they purchased the product. There is now a modern advancement in TV analytics where we are able to see a lot more information behind exactly what spot time, so the spot that that advert was on the television, by location to quite a low granularity. What we are also being able to do in print is that we can use what is called short URLs, these are unique identified URLs for every single issue of a magazine, or individual issues of a newspaper and then be able to say, of the people who saw that link and came through to the website, those are the people who we saw and we engaged with in the traditional print sense.

Attribution Models

Attribution visualizes what happened before a conversion took place. Some models of attribution include:

1.      Last non-direct click. Google analytics uses this model as their basis for their conversions. The problem is it's communicated as last click but it is not and that is one of the key things that you need to realize. For example, a person will come to the website, will engage, go and look at different products and then won't buy and then a few days later, the person will come direct to the website by typing in the URL of the brand. In analytics, in AdWords and in a number of different other platforms the credit of that conversion will not go to direct, even though direct was the visit the drove the sale. If there is less than 30 days between the last non-direct click or visit before that direct visit where the conversion was driven, then the sales credit goes to the last non-direct click. It is quite hard to explain to marketers who do not understand the data behind it.

2.      Last interaction. This is going to be the actual last interaction within a journey and therefore this will be where the sale actually happens. Last interaction attribution also is really useful when you start talking about linking the offline world to online. Because the last interaction doesn't necessarily have to be digital. It could be that you're loading in lead conversion data.

3.      Linear attribution. Linear attribution is where you distribute the value through every interaction equally. Therefore, if every visit was a different channel, you would split that back through the journey equally. But this is a large flaw with this model because it does it equally and doesn't actually show the marketer what campaigns, what channels actually impacted that user.

4.      Time decay. The next model is time decay. Time decay is basically saying when the conversion happens, let's redistribute the value of that conversion back through previous historic visits. But we're going to scale that back over time. This model has a lot of value to many organizations.

5.      Position based. This model was popularized by google analytics as being the most accurate. This model has a lot of benefits because it does align very well with how consumers actually behave. The position based model gives the understanding of the challenges of acquisition and the challenges of conversion. The first and last clicked ads are both given 40% credit, and the remaining 20% is split equally across all other clicks.

6.      Custom Attribution. In this model, you are able to build a completely custom-made model and set each touch point to have a different value. It is a very dangerous model because as a marketer, you can say a touch point has much value without the context of what is actually important to the consumers.

What Data is needed?

The first thing you need for an attribution solution is web analytics data. This is the reason why 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 lot of the attribution systems that exists today have their own analytics package that they utilize themselves, they've designed and built that. One of the things that is important for you to know is what granularity of data do you need but also do you want.

That’s it for this article, I will be posting more articles in the following weeks with more knowledge and insight about Growth Marketing.

If you want to learn more in detail about growth marketing or any other marketing course, feel free to visit CXL Institute website. They have a wide range of marketing courses and top 1% professionals in different fields of marketing that impact first class knowledge. You can also apply for their mini-degree scholarship programs just like i did.

Catch you later!