Current Situation
An attribution problem occurs in online marketing when you cannot determine the primary source of conversion, or you do not know the conversion paths followed by your online or OTT users. For example, you don’t really know where your sales came from. This issue must be addressed to drive more growth and conversion.
Goals and Objectives
A marketing attribution model is a system of quantifying the value created in each step of the customer journey. When a prospect makes a purchase, an attribution model is used to assign credit for that sale to one or more of the marketing touch points where the customer interacted.
Marketing attribution is the way advertisers determine how marketing tactics and subsequent customer interactions contributed to sales, conversions, or other goals. These marketing metrics are used to identify the channels and messages that inspire potential buyers to act.
Cross-device attribution is one of the key pieces of multitouch attribution (MTA). MTA facilitates the recording of the interactions a user has with a brand across multiple touch points and devices and ultimately attributes conversions to that activity based on algorithms and machine learning models that take a converter’s and nonconverter’s paths into account.
Where the most common attribution models aim to attribute conversions across different channels, multitouch attribution aims to attribute conversions across different web browsers and devices, as well as channels, campaigns or creatives.
To do this, attribution platforms need to collect IDs and data about the same user across different devices and channels. In web browsers, the most common way to collect user data is by creating third-party cookies and storing an ID inside them.
Technology Deployed
Marketing attribution and cross-device attribution, which is one of the key pieces of multitouch attribution
Use Case Summary
The use cases include:
Measuring the impact of awareness. With a robust data engine, advertisers can retroactively tag a person’s actions as we gather more information about them. Because attribution vendors can parse or segment touches based on funnel stages, they can hone in on which campaigns are generating activity at each stage of the funnel. This means they can inspect whether digital content has an impact on awareness.
Using marketing attribution to prove late funnel value. An advertiser working with a media company incorporated sales-generated activity and partner data (deal registrations, etc.) into their attribution model. They understood that the volume of sales emails would skew the data in the direction of sales, but that was acceptable, particularly after they met with sales leadership to click through specific opportunity examples and show them the math.
Muting campaigns. A customer’s chat tool wasn’t passing along UTM parameters to their CRM, so the advertiser lost insight into how people found themselves requesting a demo. The solution involved setting up virtual campaigns to track web activity and set up some code to pass the UTM parameters in the chat integration call as well. Once web activity began streaming into the data engine, the customer could give the full activity picture of all contacts at a given account and stop relying on the action that happened immediately before the opportunity.