Attribution 101: It's All About the Journey
Understanding how to attribute your sales can be incredibly complex for marketers. There’s a vast amount of data to take into account across the many touchpoints in your customers’ consumer journey and neatly attributing any of them to your final sale can be a real challenge.
From initial engagement to the final conversion and sale, this sprawling landscape of consumer behavior can be daunting and difficult to manage. This is where attribution models come into play. These models can be incredibly helpful for marketers, helping to decode the data and provide key insights into how their channels, messaging, and tactics are leading to conversions and driving revenue.
With these attribution models you get to see the entire story so you can connect the dots from your customer’s first interaction to their final sale. This information ultimately helps marketers allocate budgets and time among vendors in their marketing stack, providing insights that shift focus and budget towards the channels and tactics that are working best. Still, while everyone has their reasons for using their preferred models, at FieldTest we believe that not all attribution models are created equal. In this blog post we’ll review the two major models and provide you some helpful insights as to how you can best approach this complex issue.
Types of Attribution
In their simplest form, attribution approaches can be summarized as single- and multi-touchpoint measurements. Even the most savvy marketers find themselves trying to figure out which of the two attribution models to focus on, as they each tell very different stories with your data. Sophisticated marketers will utilize both of these models in different capacities at once in order to see how campaigns are generating leads at the top of the funnel, nurturing engagement in the middle of the funnel, and closing the deal at the bottom of the funnel. But the question still remains, what story do each of these models tell and how do they utilize your data to tell it? Let’s take a closer look at each here:
Single-Touch Attribution
Single touch is the simplest model of the two, as it’s the easiest to implement and track for most marketers. First touch (aka first click) and last touch (aka last click) are far and away the most popular single-touch attribution models. These give 100% of the credit for a sale to either the first or last clicks a customer makes on their consumer journey with your product.
While they’re uncomplicated and simple to set up, they oversimplify your marketing efforts by only giving credit to the beginning and end of the experience. Basically, it only tells you part of the story.
It’s easy to see why many marketers subscribe to these models of attribution, assign thinking one or two clicks lead to the final sale (like first-click and last-click attribution) makes the marketing story easy to tell, but the reality is much more complicated. The fact is there are actually an assortment of factors that led the customer to tap that “buy” button. Instead of taking the time to mine important data and clicks, many agencies are just looking to assign credit for the final sale. That’s nice, but it doesn’t help your campaign.
Multi-Touch Attribution
Multi-touch Attribution, on the other hand, can provide a much broader perspective on the customer journey, giving you keen insights into multiple touchpoints throughout your campaign. With this type of attribution, you have a lot more to take into consideration and actually track, which is why many shy away from it.
But fear not. It’s not as tricky as it seems.
Think of multi-touch like a basketball team. Instead of giving credit to the guy who made the first pass or made the 3-point shot, you’re giving equal credit to all the passes and movements that led to the ball finally going through the basket.
Multi-touch attribution can be intimidating at first, but with a little effort you’ll gain more customer intelligence than you ever thought possible with single-touch attribution. Not only do you get more accurate insights, but you get the full story behind every touchpoint so you can better understand how all your marketing efforts contribute to each stage of the customer journey.
Here at FieldTest, we know that each customer journey involves a vast array of touches from different locations, channels, and paths. Our platform excels with multi-touch attribution, providing marketers the ability to manage complicated data segments and make sense of how their customer is moving through the sales funnel.
With FieldTest, that daunting multi-touch data isn’t so daunting at all. Our platform is designed to provide you with all relevant data in an easy-to-read chart as your campaign changes and grows, which means you can understand all the important touches that lead to a sales slam dunk.
Attribution Doesn’t Imply Causation
While attribution models can help paint a good picture of the customer journey, they don’t always provide causation for the final sale. The consumer journey through your sales funnel is filled with dynamics (and distractions) that can’t be measured neatly in clicks and conversion, and it’s up to marketers to test strategies and utilize a holistic approach that takes all touchpoints into consideration.
When marketers take this approach, they get a broader view of how customers move through each stage of the funnel – not just a look at the last click that led to purchase. In today’s advertising environment, each stage plays an important role for the final sale and it’s paramount you look at the bigger picture. And while you can’t necessarily track what caused the final sale, you can use attribution to give you a better idea of what is working and what isn’t in the journey.
Closing Thoughts
Contrary to what many advertisers think, a customer’s journey is anything but linear. It’s filled with many factors beyond your control. And even though you can’t give 100% credit to any one thing that caused the final purchase, you can use our data-driven attribution insights to clearly understand what led to the sale and try to replicate and improve on those conditions.
In the end, if you take the time to widen your attribution lens, you’ll gain more insight, better understand your funnel metrics, and continually give customers the experience they want most. With FieldTest, it’s all possible…and easier than you think.