What is attribution modeling?
The word attribution modeling have been bouncing around in the digital marketing world for some time now. It may sound like this is something very complicated that only the analytical-uber-menschen-geeks can grapple and handle. But alas, its i not. In this article I will help you understand what attribution modeling is and how this can help you measure the effect of your marketing campaigns in a better way.
Also called: marketing attribution, attribution marketing
Attribution modeling is a method which helps you understand which digital marketing channels (your digital touchpoints) that have been involved in the process of a customer purchase, lead or sign-up. (Whatever you define and track as a conversion).
Today a visitor can find their way to your website via an banner ad, return to your website via a recommendation for the product from someone on Facebook, return via your AdWords campaigns and lastly use a search engine to find their way back – and finally buy that product they have been researching all this time.
This journey may not necessary be this linear, the same customers are more likely to bounce around your various digital “touch-points” aka digital marketing campaigns, your social media pages or website – before they make that final purchase.
This is where attribution modeling comes in handy – because by using this method you can:
- Gain insight to distribute your marketing budgets accordingly for better ROI
- Improve your campaigns or remove completely from your marketing mix – where you discover poor interaction, influence and results
- Compare your digital marketing channels results against each other
- Revise your CPA (cost per acquisition – e.g the cost in marketing per order generated from it)
- Reduce time to conversion
- Understand your customers journey better
- Re-schedule your campaigns
- If you run AdWords campaigns, compare keywords against each other – to see which generates more sales, thus allocate the budget accordingly
To use attribution modeling you set up rules which assigns different levels credit (or points) to a particular channel depending on the interaction and thus get the credit for the conversion (sale, lead) in the end. Then the rules you apply calculates the credits (points) and then visualizes this information for you.
For example – you can build rules/models that assigns credit/points to the last channel the customer when through before a sale. To re-use the example above;
A visitor can find their way to your website via an banner ad, return to your website via a recommendation for the product from someone on Facebook, return via your AdWords campaigns and lastly use a search engine to find their way back to the product page – and finally buy that product they have been researching all this time.
Then search would get 100% of the credit/points.
Or you can build models/rules that assigns credit to the first interaction, or all interactions, time, positions etc.
You can utilize this functionality in Google Analytics Premium.
To find out more about attribution modeling:
Learn more about the different types of models and why they are useful.
How to use attribution modeling in Google Analytics (free account) – with the help of Excel
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