How to choose the best attribution provider?

What is an attribution tool?

Attribution tools are tools that help you predict the success rate of your marketing channels including digital marketing. They are wedged between your website and marketing tools or any other endpoints that determine your which of your acquisition tools drive conversion and give a detailed view f your customer journey. They usually use tags, UTM code, or cookies to show all the touchpoints a customer goes through before they convert.

Why do you need an attribution vendor?

As attribution modeling becomes almost as important as online marketing grows complex, and customers can now engage across more touchpoints, attribution tools enable you to measure the touchpoint that influence conversion the most. 

Data sets grow larger and make attribution a lot more tasking, for example, a user may be drawn in by a particular touch point, exit the site and return later through a different one although the first touchpoint was what converted them, the second touchpoint will get credit for converting the user. This makes it easy foe conversions from different channels to be over reported and others get under reported which makes allocating marketing spend difficult. With the help of a multi attribution tool companies can get the full picture and properly allocate spend.

Considerations for choosing an attribution tool

What are some of the things to consider when choosing an attribution vendor? What are the most important aspects? There are two primary criteria to consider:

• The number of integrations the attribution has natively
• The number of devices the attribution tool can cover including full suite and mobile devices.

Another thing to consider is the ease of implementation and the cost of the tool. If the tool is intuitive to use, there may be no need to seek help from the developers’ team to install it.

Number of integrations 

When choosing the best attribution tool for you, consider how widely the tool will integrate with the tools you already use like ad tracking vendors. If the tool provides a wider coverage, then you can use more partners and publishers without needing to get an attribution tool. However, as your business grows, you may want to grow your integrations so getting a tool that has a broad coverage enables you have more options. Getting an attribution tool that has an API which integrates your email provider, CRM, search, online ad platforms.

Number of devices covered.

A good attribution tool is able to cover not only tracking and tagging of your paid media, it the tool supports multiple devices and channels, then it can give you much deeper insights on what your customer journey looks like. While it may seem wise to only focus on mobile attribution, you should also consider desktop and offline attribution too as some of them even provide tracking for your website, mobile app and email marketing.

Making the final call

Considering getting an attribution vendor alone is a great idea and the breakdown we have given in this lesson should help you make a shortlist of the elements, features and functionality to look for in an attribution tool. Before making the final call, you should conduct an in-depth review of how the tool will help your business and the accompanying costs.