April 3, 2020 •Cole Geitner
What Is Attribution in Digital Marketing?
Marketing attribution refers to the science of analyzing marketing touch points leading to a website conversion or online purchase. It helps marketers identify the paths consumers take before they purchase from you. By adopting a multi-touch attribution model, your business can obtain a much deeper understanding of your target market and can improve marketing performance significantly.
Why Is Marketing Attribution Important?
Without an understanding of what is driving your marketing performance, it is impossible to know where you should be putting your marketing budget. Once your team starts to embrace reporting from consistent algorithmic attribution reporting, you will quickly start to realize there are much better ways you can be using your marketing budget. There are many different models of attribution.
The most commonly used attribution type is Last Click attribution. The Last Click attribution model will give all of the revenue credit to whichever marketing touch was last in consumer’s journey. Although it is simple and concise, very often Last Click attribution does not tell the entire story. That is why having an Attribution report with all of the major attribution types present is so important.
So, What Can you Learn from an Attribution Report Anyway?
Like we have talked about so far, it’s all about making informed decisions. There are several different types of attribution models and they all tell different stories. By having a standardized report that you can count on day-in and day-out, you will start to notice interesting patterns between the different attribution types. Let’s look at an example of a pattern from our attribution reports in the DemandJump platform.
As you can see by this example from one of our DemandJump users, Paid Search is only the 3rd most impactful channel in terms of Last Click revenue. If you were to just look at this single attribution type, it would seem that Paid Search isn’t nearly as important as other channels. Now move over to First click attribution. Paid Search revenue attributed to First Click attribution is nearly 2x that of Last Click.
This perfectly illustrates why robust attribution reports are so important. This shows us that although Paid Search isn’t the most impactful channel for Last Click, it is incredibly efficient in bringing in new customers into their business’s funnel, and they can expect more revenue if they set aside more budget for Paid Search.
The only way your marketing team can truly understand what channels are responsible for driving conversions, you need data-driven attribution reports. This gives you a leg up against competition, as you can rest easy knowing you will always put marketing budget in the right places.
What Should You Do Next?
If you or your business are interested in learning how we can give you clarity through our attribution reporting, send us a quick message and we will be in touch! DemandJump can help you gain insights into what is really happening with your marketing and will recommend what you should do next to take advantage of your data.
