Which marketing attribution is best for your growth?

Firstly, let’s understand what is Marketing Attribution?

Marketing Attribution is the method to identify the touchpoints of a customer’s journey to conversion and further assign weightage to each of these points. The objective of having a report like this is to help you decide which channel you should focus on from a marketing perspective and which one to revisit or probably just scrap.

A customer’s journey might look something like this:

Like in the above example, a customer who is looking to buy a developmental toy for his 10 months old searches on google for one. He finds a myriad of options and each one of them talks about their unique specialty. He is unable to decide what’s best for his baby, so he decides to read a few blogs to better equip himself before he makes a buying decision. Blogs, further, help him narrow down his choices with better information. Soon he gets an advertisement flashed on his social media account from an e-commerce seller ABC Toys whose blogs he had read sometime back. He decides to visit their Website and finally finds the right option and purchases a toy for his baby.

A conversion like this may take just a day or sometimes weeks to happen. So what really worked for the ABC Toys in this case? Was it the google search engine? The information on the Blogs or the Facebook Ad or the Website design and graphics which lured the customer into buying a product.

To know what really worked to keep him on the buying path and in what proportion, you need an Attribution model. There are different types of Marketing Attribution models available which we will discuss here and also what’s the best and the most practical approach when choosing one.

1. Single-Touch : A single touch attribution model attributes the 100% credit of conversion to the first touch or the last touch point. Like in the above example, 100% credit will be given either to Google Search, if it is a first-touch attribution model. Whereas, Last-touch attribution model will give 100% credit to the company's website.

2. Multi-Touch: A multi-touch attribution model gives fractional credit to all the touchpoints in a customer’s buying path. It could be equal credit to all as in a Linear Attribution model or differential credit as in the Time-decay model where higher credits are attributed to the most recent touch points.

Which Attribution will work for you?

With so many models available out there and everyone preaching their own perspective, it is rather confusing to choose what’s best for you.

What we recommend is a mix of Last-touch and Multi-touch model and further validation with A/B testing. A/B testing is a method of comparing two options running simultaneously to judge which one performs better.