One of the best parts of online marketing is that every effort is trackable and measurable. Marketers can see which online campaigns are working and where to apportion more budget. But even with tracking capabilities there can still be a question over which method of delivery is responsible for a conversion if a consumer has visited a website a number of times via different channels.
As a marketer, for example, you may consider the first visit (touch point) to be the channel that takes the glory for the sale, even if the visitor returned several times and bought through a different channel. Fortunately, analytics can show multi touch attribution in a number of different ways.
What is Multi Touch Attribution?
If you are running many campaigns simultaneously to promote your website or products, it can be tricky to measure the ROI across multiple channels when user behaviour shows multiple visits to a site before a conversion occurs. Multi touch attribution or funnelling via analytics enables you to view the touch points of a visitor in several ways, according to how you want to analyse the data. Channels can include, organic, paid, direct, social, referral and email. Here are some examples:
Last Interaction attribution model – this attributes 100% of the conversion value to the last channel with which the customer interacted before converting on the website. If campaigns are designed to attract immediate sales, where there would be no period of consideration then this model would be appropriate.
Last Non-Direct Click model – this view ignores direct traffic and attributes 100% of the conversion value to the last channel that the customer clicked through from before buying or converting. Analytics uses this model by default when attributing conversion value in non-Multi-Channel funnels reports. You would use this model if you are wanting to consider every visit via direct to be someone who was already familiar with the brand and therefore filter them out of the equation.
Last AdWords Click model – this view attributes 100% of the conversion value to the most recent AdWords ad that the customer clicked before buying or converting. You could use this model if you want to identify the AdWords ads that had the most conversions.
First Interaction model – this one attributes 100% of the conversion value to the first channel with which the customer interacted. This model is good to use if you run ads or campaigns to create initial awareness or if you consider the first interaction to be the most important and any further interactions are only occurring because of the first.
Multi Channel Attribution
Some marketers want to show attribution to more than one channel in a visitor’s journey. The following models will show different ways to share the attribution between the channels.
The Linear model – This gives equal credit to each channel interaction on the way to conversion. Use this model if you consider every interaction to be as important as the others.
The Time Decay model – This model gives the most credit to the touchpoints that occurred nearest to the time of conversion. This could be useful if you are running short promotional campaigns and want to attribute the most weight to touchpoints that occurred during the campaign.
The Position Based model – this one allows you to merge the first and last interaction models. The credit is split between them. You can assign a different percentage to each, for example, you can attribute 60% to the first interaction and assign 20% credit to the interactions in the middle. This is a useful model if you consider the first interaction that brought the customer to you to be equally as important as the touchpoint where they actually converted.
Do I Need To Use Attribution Modelling?
If you are accountable for a large online marketing budget and need to be able to give very exact figures for ROI on every campaign, then yes, this is a useful tool. It is particularly useful for e-commerce websites where there are many heavily used channels and a lot of conversions.
Can we help?
If you would like further information on attribution modelling or any other aspect of analytics for your website, please contact one of the team on 01285 50 55 50.