Advanced monetization

Introducing multi touch attribution

Marketing teams have the major responsibility of knowing which of the company’s campaigns are working. This will help you see where you need to focus resources so you can attract new customers and also helps you plan and estimate future growth within reason. In the 90’s advertising and marketing weren’t easily measured so it was difficult for campaign leaders to see their ROI which lead to the now famous quote

“half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” – John Wanamaker, early 90’s

It’s a good thing these days digital marketing makes it easy to have a data driven approach. There is no need to “spray and pray” (spraying content everywhere and praying it works). There are tools that you can use to see impression and conversion so you have no problems discovering the ROI of your marketing campaigns. Now, the tech community has also created a trend of using data to drive growth.

These days however, as you run multiple campaigns on multiple devices, it can become tasking to measure the ROI on each campaign. Like finding out if the branded AdWords campaigns drove more sign ups and making the decision if conversions from paid searches are worth paying more for social advertising. This lessons expands on marketing attribution fundamentals, pros and cons of common attribution models and thoughts on developing your own.

Common attribution models

Some common attribution models include

Last touch.

This is a common feature in most programmatic ad platforms and tools. All credit of conversion is given to the last impression or campaign that draws in a lead. So if you’re running one campaign or two this model is appealing because of its simplicity. But when you are running multiple marketing channels, it can be misleading because you won’t be able to properly allocate marketing funding. This means other channels don’t get credit because it sways results in the favor of one advertising platform. The platform may also have some bias in showing you which point was the last touch.

First touch.

This is the direct opposite of last touch attribution model. Here the first impression a lead interacted with is given all the credit for conversion. It’s easy to get started with this model as most tools come with it however as with the last touch model, it won’t work when a business has multiple marketing channels as it is not as granular as you need to get information on allocating funds for marketing.

What is multi touch attribution?

Understanding the first and last touch models is quite simple although they are flawed however details are important when your customers journey is spread over more multiple campaigns or devices. Multi touch attribution allows you to determine the value of each touch point that turns a lead into a conversion. This way you can figure out which campaign or channel should get credit for conversion so you can allocate more resources to that channel to get more customers. Multi touch attribution can be seen as the rules that assign weight or credit to each marketing channel or an equation with customer touch points on one end with its weight and cost per impression and conversion value to your business on the other end.

Linear

In this model, all of the leads interactions are given the same amount of credit for conversion. It is a bit better than the first and last touch models but also a little wrong as well.

Time decay

With this model, the interactions closest to the conversion event get all the credit for it, it makes sense as experts have said that touch points that appear earlier get less credit because if they were great, they would’ve converted the lead sooner.

Custom

The custom model is more advanced in that it allows you set your own value on each interactions. Companies tend to go for a U model giving the first and last interactions more weigh and the steps in between get the rest.

Building your own attribution model

Building your own model can be complex however in some situations it helps you understand and measure your ROI more effectively so you can allocate resources properly such as when:

• You have more than 5 campaigns running at the same time which you spend significantly on
• Your micro conversion events are tied to economic values
• Your monthly paid marketing budget is large

The important thing is to have a pre-existing model, take it and keep adding adjustments until it delivers the most conversions for your business. It’s also important that end conversions be monitored closely so if your conversion quality falls then you know to correct course. Below are some things you can adjust:

Micro conversion events

You can think of these as the user behaviors you place more value on.  Micro conversions are pre conversion events that adds value to your business. Remember to also pay attention to the final conversions quality. You may find yourself targeting the wrong audience if you focus all your effort and resources on funneling users to micro conversion events.

You should consider the following when choosing an attribution model to work with.

All businesses are different

Think of what provides more value to your business, qualified leads? Signups? Also think of the average LTV of your customers and whether or not you want them to pay subscriptions in one time charges or monthly payments. The answers you get will guide your strategy for customer acquisition as you’ll identify what channels to launch your campaigns on and create a budget for your ad spends.

No model is perfect.

For now, multi touch attribution is equal parts art and science and considering trends or comparing campaigns can help you decide which strategies to drop or carry on with. The custom weights in multi-channel attribution tend to change over time because your target audience will change as well, the message you put out changes and your budget for paid marketing will grow so putting in a whole lot of effort into a model that may change soon isn’t completely worth it. You can develop it to a point where it is sufficient to survive in a rapidly changing environment.

Are you comfortable with it?

The level of sophistication of the model you choose should be what your resources can handle and what your team is comfortable with. A model like last touch is quite easy to understand and implement and custom models will require more effort and time but last touch discounts other forms of marketing like display ads and if you don’t have a big budget, all the effort that goes into creating a custom model may be misplaced as the residual marginal return on ad spend may not be worth it.