What is Attribution Modeling

- Sunday, April 11, 2021

A customer can have hundreds of interactions with a brand before ever making a single purchase. Attribution modeling is a set of rules for assigning credit to the various touchpoints in the conversion path. Digital Marketing Attribution Modeling is a practise of assigning credit to marketing touchpoints in the customer journey. The objective of attribution model is to determine which all marketing channels have impacted users on their path to conversion.

What is Attribution Modeling

It helps marketers understand trends in how prospects move through the path to purchase. This information can then be used for future budget allocations and strategies. Sure, you might know what landing page a customer converted on, but what about all the social media posts, web content, and website pages that also influenced their decision to buy? All these interactions should change how you allocate resources so you can maximize ROI.

Types of Attribution Models

Let's go over a few of the most common types of attribution models, and depending on the product you sell and the length of your buying cycle, one might make more sense than the other.

First Interaction

First-touch attribution is where 100% of the credit is assigned to the page that originally drove a visitor to your site. This model does overemphasize top-of-the-funnel marketing efforts, but it's an easy way to know what exactly is attracting people to your brand.

Last Interaction

Last-touch attribution singles out the first touchpoint of the most recent visit. So if a visitor views a blog post, clicks a CTA, and converts on a landing page, the blog post will receive the credit. The last interaction model gives credit to the touchpoint where a conversion directly occurred.

Linear

The linear attribution model gives equal credit to every interaction during the buyer's journey. So an in-person event is given the same weight as a click on a banner ad.

Time Decay

A simple decay attribution model assigns a weighted percentage of the credit to the most recent touchpoints. Use this if your buying cycle is short as it assumes that the assets a prospect interacted with closer to the time of sale are most important in the purchase decision.

Custom

You can make your own custom attribution model, with other variables like Time Spent on each visit, or Page Views per visits, or type of Content Viewed (i.e. Product Page, Demo, Webinar, Case Study etc.).

These complex buyer's journey makes job harder and which means we need a more sophisticated way to measure what channels and assets are creating sales opportunities. That's why marketers are relying on attribution modeling.

Conclusion

Attribution modeling can be complex. There is NO right or wrong way, but you won't truly know if you're spending your time and resources on the right marketing activities without this.

Joydeep Deb

Marketing . Innovation . Technology

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About the Author
Joydeep Deb

Joydeep Deb is a Senior Digital Marketer and Project Manager with strong experience in Digital Marketing, Lead Generation, Online Brand Management, Marketing Campaigns, Project Management, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), PPC, eMail Marketing, Web Analytics, Web Technologies, Web Design and Development.

With an MBA in Marketing. IIM Calcutta Alumini. Lives in Bangalore, Karnataka - India.

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