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How do you know which of these steps is most responsible for converting the lead?
Attribution Modeling Overview
Paid Search1
Website2
Landing Page3
Form4
Lead5
You can’t enter the mind of your customer, but you can model their behavior based on existing customer data. Various attribution models exist—the trick is to find the right one.
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What is Attribution Modeling?
Today’s marketing landscape is broader, deeper, and more complex than ever before. There are more channels, more choices, and more customers who get smarter every day. Marketing strategies have evolved from multi-channel to omni-channel: a customer-centric approach that weaves all the marketing touchpoints together to create an integrated and immersive experience. Companies need new tools and methodologies to succeed in this fast-paced environment, and need to see and understand the internal mechanisms and dynamics of their marketing.
Measuring the effectiveness of this marketing requires attribution.
Marketing attribution illuminates the full scope of how your prospects and customers engage with your brand—across all channels—from the top of the funnel to conversion. It ties all your marketing touchpoints together to paint a thorough picture that clarifies which combination of factors influence conversion.
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Attribution Modeling Overview
Single-touch attribution is the practice of attributing results to a single touchpoint along the journey. The touchpoint is typically identified by whichever sales or marketing touch is easiest to track with the technology available to the organization at the time.
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Single-Touch Attribution
Large companies with complex marketing strategies—typically B2B companies—have many influencers from the same account interacting with a myriad of modern marketing strategies over a long period of time. Each one of those interactions results in data. A single-touch model would only assign credit to one step of potentially dozens, which oversimplifies the customer’s buying journey.
By contrast, Multi-Touch Attribution uses weighted modeling in order to allocate credit to each of the influence channels in the marketing funnel, including campaigns, keywords, and touchpoints.
A customer’s decision to purchase something can be influenced by many factors, including a search ad they clicked on, or something they saw on social media, but ultimately didn’t click on. All events along the journey are related to conversion, and importance is determined differently based on the goals of the marketing team.
Multi-Touch Attribution
An attribution model is made up of rule sets that determine how credit for sales and lead conversions get assigned to touchpoints along the conversion path. Conversion paths include all interactions that lead up to a lead conversion or customer transaction, and may include one or more digital channels, such as:
Email campaigns or newsletters Social networks Paid and organic search Digital advertising
All paths are different, but a common example of a conversion path begins when a new visitor navigates to your website from a banner ad, and eventually becomes a qualified lead for your sales team. Every step along the way is a part of the path.
Modern businesses need to know how their investments in marketing are performing, and which steps along the path are the most valuable. To do so, they attributeresults to specific touchpoints.
Upwards of fifteen different attribution models exist, each with their unique advantages and drawbacks. While many of them ultimately look to achieve the same goals, the biggest model disparity is between Single-Touch Attribution and the more complex, Multi-Touch Attribution modeling.
An organization that focuses on activities centered around a CRM tool, for example, would most likely choose opportunity creation, or Last-Touch Attribution, for their single-touch model. An organization that relies heavily on marketing automation software, or invests heavily in paid search, probably measures their marketing using First-Touch Attribution.
Single-touch models are straightforward and easy to use. They make sense for companies with simple marketing strategies, short sales cycles, and customers who make quick purchasing decisions, but these models lack the sophistication to accurately capture complex strategies.
Single-Touch Models
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Full credit is given to a customer’s first point of contact with the brand. This model
helps distinguish which channels bring in new leads.
First-Touch
Prioritizes the most recent interaction over any preceding steps. Highlights which
touchpoints trigger immediate conversion.
Last-Touch
Ignores direct traffic and attributes all credit to the last channel the customer
clicked through before buying or converting.
Last Non-Direct
Gives credit to the marketing campaign that directly turns qualified leads over to
the sales team.
Tipping Point
Often, the first customer touch is anonymous, so attribution is given to the point where the actual lead was created.
Lead Conversion
Multi-Touch Models
Gives equal credit to each individual touchpoint along the journey, no matter how important.
Linear
This model gives the most credit to more recent interactions, and works well in long B2B sales cycles with less relevant early touchpoints.
Time Decay
Gives the highest credit to the first and last touch and divides the remaining credit among the in-between points. Good model for measuring end-to-end performance.
U-Shaped
Similar to U-Shaped, but also assigns high value to the touchpoint that coincides with lead creation. Works for B2B companies with a distinct handoff from Marketing to Sales.
W-Shaped
Marketing campaigns are each different from the last, and custom attribution models may be the best way to focus on new or different touchpoints.
Custom
If your organization uses only one attribution model, you may be at risk of not getting the complete picture of your marketing effectiveness. This could result in either over-valuing or under-valuing your sources, channels, or campaigns.
For example, say a prospective customer first sees you at a trade show, but they forget the name of your company. The next day they perform a web search, find their way to your website and, ultimately, become a new lead.
If you are using a first-touch model, the trade show display campaign would receive full credit for the new lead. This would under-value the contributions of paid search, which ultimately brought the customer to your site.
Instead, if you are using a last-touch model, the paid search would receive the full credit for the lead, though they actually first heard of you at the trade show. Because of these single-touch model downfalls, some organizations try to use multiple single-touch attribution models that benefit each separate campaign, source, or channel. However, if you aggregate the data from all of those reports, you risk over-counting. In the previous scenario, if you used both a first-touch (trade show display) and last-touch (paid search) model, you would count that converted lead twice in your reporting, leading to inaccurate results.
Because of this, most companies will eventually want to look at a multi-touch attribution model for a more comprehensive, higher-level view of performance. The specific model selected depends on your sales cycle, questions that need answering, and end goals.
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At ThreeBridge, we’ve built a proprietary system using machine learning to accurately forecast which multi-channel attribution model works best for any scenario.
Our team of data scientists and marketing gurus have helped clients around the country make the most of their marketing budgets. Contact us to learn more.
Selecting a Model
