As marketers, it is crucial to think about marketing attribution to determine what is and is not working for the brand. Attribution reveals the platforms producing the most value for your company, improving return on investment.
This piece will examine the most popular attribution models and explain their benefits so that you can select the one that will work best for your clients.
Marketing credit is a topic that gets a lot of attention for a good reason. In the realm of marketing, it’s a hot topic, but what does it mean? It all comes down to monitoring how consumers engage with your brand and determining which results in a sale. As marketers, we are responsible for using this data to determine what is and what is not effective. Although it might seem overwhelming, this piece will significantly clarify the idea. We’ll examine the most popular credit models, explain what they entail, and offer advice on picking the best model for your customers.
Finding the touchpoints:
Analysis of the marketing touchpoints that result in a transaction or purchase is known as attribution. It’s critical for marketers to know which touchpoints are the most effective because the typical consumer needs at least 15 touches before making a choice.
By identifying the platforms producing the most value for your company, attribution aids in improving return on investment.
To better comprehend the success of our marketing initiatives and make the most efficient use of our resources, attribution modeling was developed. There are various techniques for attribution modeling, and each one assigns responsibility to multiple places along the customer journey. Consequently, we can pick the option that suits us the best.
Common attribution theories include the following:
First Click Attribution:
Let’s talk about the First Click attribution model, which gives the first touchpoint a customer interacts with all the credit for a transaction. For instance, Facebook would be given full credit for the sale if the customer’s journey begins there.
The company and media buying strategy determine whether to use the First Click attribution model. This credit model is appropriate if it is decided that the first touchpoint is more significant than the last.
One possible use case for First Click attribution is understanding the effectiveness of top-of-funnel initiatives. It allows marketers to attribute the customer’s initial exposure to the brand to the first touchpoint. This method is beneficial when assessing advertising campaigns that aim to raise brand recognition.
Last Click Attribution:
Let’s now look at the Last Click attribution model, which gives the final touchpoint before conversion full credit for the transaction. When a customer’s journey began on Facebook and ended with a purchase from Google, then Google would be given full credit for the transaction.
Evaluating the proportional significance of various touchpoints when considering Last Click attribution is crucial. Consider which party is more valuable: the person who brought the client into the store or the salesperson who made the sale.
Although last-click credit is a helpful method for assessing the health of a channel, it occasionally contains errors. Giving the final touchpoint full credit might not be appropriate if a customer journey includes top-of-funnel Facebook ads doing most of the work and a bottom-of-funnel Google conversion ad completing the sale.
This clarifies the significance of attribution models for taking into account the entire funnel journey rather than giving a clear picture of a channel’s success. The following approach we’ll look at, fractional attribution, enables marketers to allocate credit across touchpoints more precisely.
Fractional Attribution:
A model known as “fractional attribution” assigns credit to each interaction with the user throughout their path, from the first to the conversion. There are a few different kinds of multi-touch attribution schemes, though.
One is the linear model, which accords equal credit for the sale to each touch point along the customer path. The exact weights are given to each touchpoint.
The Time Decay model is another model that provides more weight (credit) to touch points close to the conversion.
On the other hand, the U-Shaped model (also called the position-based model) recognizes the middle contact points while giving the first and last touch points the majority of the credit.
In contrast to the U-Shaped model, the W-Shaped model equally distributes the remaining credit among the in-between touch points while crediting the three milestone touch sites.
Triple Attribution:
The Triple Attribution model also assigns credit to the last advertisement that a customer clicked on a specific site, like Facebook or Google. According to this model, a particular customer’s final click-through on each marketing channel is credited with the buy.
For instance, Facebook ad #2 would receive credit in Facebook data, and the TikTok ad would receive credit in TikTok data if a consumer clicked on Facebook ad #1, Facebook ad #2, a TikTok ad, and then made their purchase. Each ad platform gives more weight to the last click, and that provides credit.
How significant is marketing attribution?
For marketers, understanding the results of their marketing endeavors is essential, and attribution is a vital tool in achieving this understanding. Marketers can allocate resources carefully and determine which channels are underperforming by examining various marketing channels’ return on investment (ROI).
With credit, marketers would be able to evaluate their efforts’ effectiveness and be clear about what is driving revenue for their company.
Increasing the effectiveness of your marketing activities
Businesses can find effective marketing channels, recognize efficient strategies, assess marketing programs, identify top-performing campaigns, and identify impactful marketing messages using a strong marketing attribution method.
How to overcome typical obstacles and select the best marketing attribution model
Despite the advantages of marketing attribution, its implementation has its share of difficulties. Here are some specific barriers that businesses run into, as well as advice for conquering them:
Choosing the appropriate attribution strategy
Choosing the appropriate attribution model for your company is one of the biggest challenges. Knowing which model best fits your company can be difficult when there are so many to choose from. Before selecting an attribution model, you should consider your company objectives, the customer journey, and the available data to overcome this difficulty. You can also test various options to discover the best model for your business.
Purchasing the appropriate equipment
Investing in the appropriate technology to support your marketing attribution efforts is also a significant challenge. Many organizations need help choosing and applying the proper tools and technologies to enable attribution tracking and analysis. You should investigate and assess various technologies to ascertain which suits your requirements best to surmount this challenge. You should also spend money on training to ensure your team can utilize these tools successfully.
Ensuring data uniformity and accuracy
More accurate and consistent data can significantly hamper effective marketing credit. To overcome this difficulty, you must ensure that your data-gathering and analysis procedures are accurate, dependable, and consistent. To ensure your data is accurate and consistent across all platforms, consider putting data governance policies and practices into place.
By addressing these typical issues, you can put into practice marketing attribution strategies that will guide your decision-making regarding your marketing initiatives and promote company expansion.
How to pick a tool for marketing attribution:
Make a choice that is informed for your business. Selecting the best marketing attribution platform may be challenging because there are many choices, each with its own models, techniques, and tracking.
Take into account the following considerations to make the best decision for your company:
Ensure that the platform’s goals and company objectives align with one another.
- Assess the platform’s UI and user experience to determine your team’s ability to use it effectively.
- Determine the degree of customer support, whether through customer success agents or another channel.
- Assess the speed at which you will obtain insightful information that will enable you to make swift and well-informed choices.
- Check for automation features on the platform, such as automatic report generation and email file distribution.
- Assess the platform’s compatibility with your e-commerce platform using its integration possibilities.
- Determine the scope of the platform, including its marketing channels and social media sites, by looking at its coverage of social media and marketing channels.
