Multi Touch Attribution

In previous blogs, we have discussed the importance of setting KPIs and goals, analyzing results and tracking all of your marketing efforts. But, it’s not that easy as most customers need to see a message several times before making a purchase in today’s multichannel marketing world. So, what medium gets credit for the sale?

Think of it as a soccer game. The player who scores the goal is the one that gets his name in the boxscore. But, if the defense never clears the ball and the midfielders don’t advance it, the goal scorer on the front line never gets the chance to score. To lead the league in scoring, you need to have assists along the way.

Many marketers take the easy way out by using single touch attribution. Usually it means whoever kicks the ball into the net, gets credit for the sale. Final click attribution probably made sense in the early days of the internet. After all, just doing any kind of attribution was better than nothing. Today, however, single touch attribution is likely not sophisticated enough to be the best method for determining where your sales come from. 

Today, sophisticated marketers are using a more holistic approach to the customer buying experience by using multi touch attribution. It is likely that multiple actions are working in connection with one another, and all contribute to a weighted modeling approach to attribution. The question is, what percentage of the sale is attributed to each touch point? Are they all equally important? Or, does the first and last touch point deserve greater consideration?

Let’s take a look at some of the most common attribution methods being used.

• First Touch — The initial message received gets 100% of the credit for the sale.
• Final Touch — The final message that usually results in a tap through gets 100% of the credit for the conversion.
• Linear — All touch points get equal credit along the buying journey.
• U Shape Model — In the U shape model, more credit is given to the first and last touchpoint and those in between get assigned the remainder. This attribution is also called “position-based attribution” or “multi-channel attribution.” Often, the first and last touchpoints get 40% each and those contacts in the middle split the remaining 20%.
• Time Decay — In this method, the most recent touchpoints get the most credit and the earlier touch points get a declining share of the attribution credit.
• Custom Modeling — Is watching a 30 second video of your product more valuable to the penultimate sale than seeing a banner ad? 
• Cost Modeling — You pay different CPM rates for different types of advertising. In this method, those costs are assigned to an overall percentage of the sale. The more expensive the marketing, the greater percentage that touchpoint receives.

One of the messages that has been prevalent for the Purplegator team is the ability to monitor and gauge results. There’s no official right or wrong way to measure this as the various attribution models concur. The savvy marketer just has to pick the one that makes the most sense for his or her unique situation.