Marketing Attribution: How Marketing Attribution Works

Marketing attribution is the process of assessing which of a company’s marketing activities are leading to sales traffic and driving customer conversion rates. In today’s digital economy, a company’s marketing spend might be divided among a number of platforms. For instance, a digital marketing mix within a sales cycle could include search engine ads, social media ads, social media influencers, and online content marketing aimed at SEO and organic search. A robust marketing attribution effort examines which of these marketing channels has generated a particular new lead or customer conversion.

There are two main types of marketing attribution models: single-source attributions and multi-source attributions. These in turn break down into seven different attribution models.

1. 1. First-touch attribution: First-touch attribution grants conversion credit to the first touchpoint on a buyer journey, also known as lead creation. If a person first encounters a brand via a search engine ad, this single-touch attribution model gives full credit to that ad for future e-commerce sales. This marketing attribution model is sometimes called first-click attribution.
2. 2. Last-touch attribution: This single-touch attribution metric credits a buyer’s last touchpoint with driving the sale. In e-commerce, this is sometimes called last-click attribution. For instance, if a potential customer first learned of a product via a social media campaign but ultimately bought it by clicking a link in an email marketing newsletter, the credit goes to the email campaign.
3. 3. Linear marketing attribution: A linear attribution model gives equal credit to all marketing touchpoints encountered on a customer journey.
4. 4. U-shaped marketing attribution: This multi-touch attribution model is weighted for the first touchpoint and last touchpoint in a buyer journey. It gives forty percent credit to each of these touchpoints and divides the remaining twenty percent credit to any touchpoints that take place in between.
5. 5. W-shaped marketing attribution: This multi-touch attribution model starts with a U-shaped approach and adds a middle marketing touchpoint that is rated as equally important to the first and last touchpoints. Each of the three main touchpoints gets thirty percent credit, and the remaining touchpoints share ten percent credit.
6. 6. Time decay marketing attribution: The time decay attribution model is popular in business-to-business marketing (B2B marketing) applications. It presumes a long sales cycle with spread out marketing touchpoints. While the time decay attribution grants some credit to all marketing touchpoints, it gives most credit to the touchpoints at the end of a sales cycle.
7. 7. Full path marketing attribution: Like a linear marketing attribution, the full path attribution template credits all stages of a marketing campaign for customer conversions. Yet like a W-shaped attribution, it focuses on major touchpoints in a buyer’s journey. It operates under the principle that certain marketing touchpoints can be very impactful (like webinars or a one-on-one sales pitch), but they are most effective when buttressed by smaller interactions like seeing a digital ad or a social media post.

If none of these types of attribution suits the nature of your marketing strategy, you can always create your own custom attribution model. You can optimize your custom model for the specific campaigns used by your marketing and sales teams.

Marketing attribution tools have advanced quickly in the world of machine learning. Today’s major brands use attribution software to track real-time lead conversions and assess their overall marketing ROI (return on investment).

Many customer relationship management (CRM) platforms include attribution software in some of their pricing tiers, or you can subscribe to a service that does nothing but track conversion paths through algorithmic attribution. The attribution tools you choose will ultimately depend upon your marketing budget and your ambitions for improving your brand’s bottom line.

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