Marketing is a complex endeavor with many moving parts. Understanding the effectiveness of your marketing efforts can be difficult, but multi-touch attribution can help. Multi-touch attribution analyzes all of a customer’s interactions with your brand and assigns a value to each interaction. This helps you understand which marketing channels are most effective in driving customers to purchase. By understanding your marketing efforts, you can optimize your campaigns to improve ROI.
Guide to multi-touch attribution
In the past, marketing attribution was much simpler. You had a few channels that were easy to understand and manage (think print ads or television commercials), and measuring customer behavior wasn’t as complex. Nowadays, however, marketing campaigns are often multi-channel—and we typically cannot attribute conversions to one single source of traffic because customers can interact with a brand in so many different ways.
This is where multi-touch attribution comes into play. Multi-touch attribution allows you to understand how your marketing channels work together to drive customer behavior and conversions. Then, using this data, you can optimize your campaigns to ensure that you’re getting the most return on investment (ROI) from your marketing efforts.
What is the best multi-touch attribution model?
In a perfect world, we would accurately measure the impact of every marketing touchpoint on our desired outcomes. But as any experienced marketer knows, the reality is far from perfect. There are too many variables at play and too much uncertainty around how individual touchpoints interact with each other. Determining which marketing touchpoint was most responsible for a given outcome can feel like trying to nail jelly to a wall.
Fortunately, technology has given us some powerful tools to help us overcome this challenge. For example, multi-touch attribution models allow us to understand better different marketing channels’ roles in driving our desired outcomes.
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. This is certainly true in marketing, especially when attributing credit for conversions and sales across channels. With the explosion of ad tech platforms and attribution software vendors, there are now literally dozens of different ways to model out how your customer journey results from interactions with various advertisements that they see. But which one is correct?
It turns out there isn’t a single correct answer for every business or campaign. Instead, choosing an attribution model that fits your business and campaigns best takes into account numerous aspects of your customers’ buying journeys and their behavior after conversion. While this may sound like a lot to consider, our experience in the industry has led us to create a framework for choosing an attribution model that we believe will help you make the right choice.
