05/06/2022
FIRST THINGS to KNOW đ§
Attribution is tricky. That's a gross understatement, but an important warning just the same. There are a few situations in which attribution is as unmistakably clear as a dead mouse in a mousetrapâbut the rest is different shades of arguable, ambiguous, or (at the deep end) simply unknowable.
That does NOT mean you shouldn't try to figure out attribution. You should. It just means that you should seek realistic expectations for what can and can't be attributed.
Complicating it a bit further...
Attribution isn't winner-takes-all. In other words: attribution doesn't mean giving ALL of the credit to, say, one ad in a series with six other touchpoints. Attribution first happens at the individual levelâfiguring out where each conversion came from, individually, because people don't all convert at the same touchpointâand even so, credit might be split into pieces for a single conversion. The group numbers compile from there.
There's often a lot of pressure to get attribution figured out. Some of the reasons for this are good and constructive, like just needing to figure out which parts of your funnel or campaign are working, and which parts are not working. Common-sense stuff.
The plot does thicken, however. There's often pressure from aboveâand it's no coincidence that attribution is the single word at the heart of so many heartless ROI questions (whether spoken or not). Such a person sees Money In vs. Money Out, and attribution is ultimately a way to measure the Money In side of the equation. The teams without a clear tie to the money are asked to justify themselves, often without warning.
Again, that's fair to a certain point... but before long, the focus on ROI and attribution for every single detail of marketing is missing the point and it's also just damn exhausting. We highly recommend this post from Rand Fishkin on the subject.
You don't have to figure everything out from scratch. They have models to follow. We won't complicate things too much for now, except to show you five common ways of assigning attribution (graphic below) and put them to work in the example below.
FOR EXAMPLE âłď¸
1ď¸âŁ A hungry Google user types âbest salmon recipeâ into the search engine and lands on your recipe website. They cook it up just as you said and they love it.
2ď¸âŁ Two days later, they see an ad on Instagram to opt in and download your lead magnet with your 10 best seafood recipes. They do so.
3ď¸âŁ Three days after that, you send them an email promotion for 25% off your cookbook. They visit the cookbookâs product page, but they donât buy it.
4ď¸âŁ One day after that, they see a Google Search Ad for your cookbook, click on it, and this time they do buy it.
Trick question, but try to answer anyway: Which of those four marketing âtouchpointsâ should be credited with the sale?
It's a trick question because the answer depends on your preferred attribution model (see graphic above). So here's how each of those five models would interpret the situation:
Last Click: 100% of the credit is given to the last touchpoint. In our example, the Google Search Ad would be our hero.
First Click: Weâre guessing you can figure this one out. In our example, our SEO team would get all the credit.
Linear: Each touchpoint gets equal credit. In our example, all four touchpoints would get 25% credit each.
Position Based: The first and last position each get 40% of the love and the remaining 20% is divvied up amongst any touchpoints in between. In our example, SEO and Google Ads will get 40% each while email and Insta ads would get 10% credit each.
Time Decay: With Time Decay (our personal favorite), the touchpoints closest to the sale get more credit than those further back in time. In our example, Google Ads would get the lionâs share of the attribution whilst SEO would get the least (which, for most cases, makes the most intuitive sense to us). and speaking of attribution, this came from the marketing e-newsletter, The CLIKK
