If you are in the online marketing sector, you have probably heard often enough that the last-click attribution model is not flexible enough for your business.
Yet many enjoy using it. The one who made the final push to the conversion wins – this simplicity is too much to resist. Just like in football, the one who scored a goal gets his name attached to the goal minute. He turned that opportunity into a conversion.
But wait – imagine you’re the trainer of the football team. Should the scorer be the only one who gets the credit for the goal? What would you think of the one who made that fantastic pass to the scorer? Or the defenders that ensured your competing team didn’t score?
Understanding your overall strategy
Giving credit to the scorer for the goal makes sense in a team of one, but there is typically more than one person involved en route to that goal. As in the post-match analytics, it is only fair to consider the entire team’s tactic and its players’ synergy prior to the goal.
Similarly, in the realm of online marketing, analysing this overall strategy leading up to conversions is crucial, as selecting the right attribution model is determined by it. The online marketing strategy is now made more complex with the myriad of channels as well as an increasing number of media players and devices that customers are using to interact with brands in the digital space. The strategy can be summarised into three elements: earned, owned and paid media. Each of these three elements consists of numerous media players that have an effect on the customer’s decision to purchase. The question begs – which ones are strategic to the goal and to what extent did they actually contribute to the goal?
Recognising synergy
In football, it is crucial to understand the synergy among your players. You need to know which your best players are and in which role they should play. Removing poorly-positioned players may not necessarily lead to a drop in goals, while focusing on a handful of strategic players may already lead to better performance. As trainer, it is your role to experiment and understand the synergy in order to form your ideal team.
Similarly, as a marketer, it is important to have a clear view of your customer journey. Recognising the media players for their first, assist and last interactions with customers, as well as the synergy that the media players have with one another in relation to the conversion enable marketers to adjust their data-driven strategy and spend more efficiently. For instance, fine-tuning the assist-interaction media players can lead to a better and more cost-efficient sales strategy. On the other hand, understanding how first-interaction media player encourages customer interaction can justify a branding budget, which still today is a prominent challenge many CMOs struggle with.
Selecting the “right” attribution model with the right technology
The question begs: which attribution model is the right one to use?
The bad news is: there is no textbook answer to this question.
The good news is: there is the most suitable one for your needs. And this can be determined and executed with the right technology in place.
While most technologies provide attribution models on a “channel” level, what is commonly known as channels can be too broad for proper analysis, so fine-tuning business decisions that affect your marketing investment can be hard to do. For example, going back to the online marketing strategy – you may have social media as part of your paid media strategy, and social media is often known as a channel. However, social media also has various media players, such as Facebook and Twitter, and businesses commonly invest differently in these media players. Therefore, it is crucial for your technology to be able to break down the information gathered to such granularity when attributing the winner for a conversion.
Your technology provider also needs to be able to customise all conversion targets to match your KPIs, so that you can more accurately view customer journeys leading to conversions as determined by your business.
Since most online businesses are present in more than one market and every market may have different online marketing strategies, your technology also needs to have international capabilities to support varying attribution models for varying markets.
Determining the right attribution model through experiments
Because attribution modelling steers your marketing reports, decisions and budget, it is a process not to be understated.
There are three crucial steps in the process of determining the right attribution model:
- With your technology, simulate various attribution models with your historical data for comparison.
- Customise your attribution models to the level of granularity that you need.
- Repeat the dynamic process of the simulation analysis and attribution configuration until you get the one that best fits your business goals. This needs to be done regularly in order to keep them in sync with your dynamic business strategy.
Only so can you find the right attribution model that best fits your business goals!
