What is Attribution Modeling - How it works?

For every marketer understanding, accurately how leads are generated and why what made customers buy is the ultimate goal. Attribution Moedling plays an important role to achieve this.

Remember the old days of customer support or sales guys asking a potential client “How did you hear about us?”. We all knew this works offline.

How will you measure that in your digital campaigns? Don’t say I’ll create a post-sales survey, that’s too mainstream.

How can you find out without asking customers? And the answer is attribution modeling.

So you may be asking, if it’s so great why is attribution modeling not mainstream today?

If we perform a simple google search, we can see articles & posts dating back to 2017 on attribution modeling.

The answer? It’s hard! That’s why.

But it’s doable with a little education & prior preparation.

Attribution modeling requires a fair amount of time to set up, the proper integration of 3rd party tools and tracking codes, and daily monitoring of campaigns to ensure the goals have been met. But in my opinion, it’s well worth it in the end.

So what is attribution modeling exactly?

Attribution modeling is a refined, sophisticated method to accurately measure which digital marketing channels are creating sales opportunities for your business.

It’s a set of rules for assigning credit to the various touchpoints in the conversion path, which helps marketers understand trends with how consumers specifically interact with your ads and navigate through the buyer’s journey.

To put it another way, it’s cool but it takes a lot of effort 🙂

Regardless of the efforts, it takes to set up and implement correctly, marketers and agencies that utilize attribution modeling are identifying real ROI and defining what performs, what doesn’t.

How to optimize their multi-channel marketing campaigns correctly, only those marketers are winning today.

Let’s take a more in-depth look at the various types of attribution models that are available to all marketers within Google Analytics.

First Click Attribution

First click attribution is where 100% of the credit is assigned to the digital marketing channel that initially drove a visitor to your website.

It’s an easy way to assess the way users are attracted to your brand.

This model strongly emphasizes top of the funnel marketing strategies, such as a cold outreach campaign, like display advertising.

Last Click Attribution

Last click attribution highlights the first touchpoint of the most recent visit. For example, if a user views and clicks on a Facebook ad that drives them to a landing page, and then immediately converts. The Facebook ad gets the credit for the conversion.

Position-based Attribution

Position-based attribution gives equal credit to the first and last touchpoints.

The most common percentage allocation for credit is 40% to the first click, 40% to the last click, and the remaining 20% is split evenly amongst the remaining touchpoint(s) in-between.

Meaning if an email campaign generated the first click, a blog post from your SEO made the last click, both would receive 40% of the credit….. with 20% going to every click to your paid digital media that was ran in the middle.

Time Decay Attribution

Time decay attribution assigns a weighted percentage of the credit to the most recent touchpoints within your digital marketing campaign.

This is best used if our purchase cycle is short or momentary, as it assumes the assets a user interacts with is the most important to the final purchase decision.

Linear Attribution

Linear attribution gives equal credit to every single interaction throughout the marketing campaign, meaning the click on the digital ad that led to the purchase.

It’s just as important as every other touchpoint within the ads served and clicked within the digital campaign.

Data-driven Attribution

Data-driven attribution is the recommended model for all eligible advertisers.

Powered by dynamic algorithms, it uses our account data and Google’s machine learning capabilities to determine which specific ads, keywords, and campaigns have the most significant impact on your business goals.

To use this model, our account must have at least 15,000 clicks on google search, and 600+ conversions within the past 30-days—just a heads up.

Conclusion

In conclusion, attribution modeling can provide real visibility into your campaign’s conversions.

Yes, it’s not super easy to execute, but we won’t know if our time and resources are being devoted to the appropriate digital channels without it.

Attribution modeling is a great way to leverage Google Analytics to our advantage in our responsibility to prove which advertising mediums are producing the best bang for the buck.

Considering how competitive today’s digital landscape is, why not learn how it works to help eliminate guessing games? Let’s stop guessing together and start measuring instead. In that game, everybody wins.

Here’s a quick video by Hubspot on Attribution Modeling.

Check my recent post on Google Analytics myth about bounce rate.