How to Choose the Best Attribution Model for Your Business

How to Choose the Best Attribution Model for Your Business | Business Management | Emeritus

Attribution has been an intriguing challenge for marketers from the early days of the 20th century. Before “UTM parameters” became commonspeak, the lack of data and tracking made measuring campaign success excruciatingly difficult. Did that catchy jingle cause the sales spike or was it the coupon in the magazine? Was the billboard a better investment or a celebrity endorsement? Ultimately how much credit are each of these channels due? With the increasing number of marketing channels, attribution has also become that much more complex. And it is compounding in complexity proportional to the length of the sales cycle. Enter attribution models. Briefly, this is a set of rules for assigning credit to various touchpoints in a customer journey.

Attribution Models: A Brief Background

Scope of Business Analytics

Even after several decades post the Internet, we often continue to use Single-Touch attribution models. Those, however, make marketing insights one-dimensional. But we are also starting to see early adopters of Multi-Touch attribution models especially in Internet- and data-first companies and businesses that have several marketing channels in their mix. Single-Touch attribution gives all the credit to just one marketing channel. On the other hand, Multi Touch assigns fractional credit to different channels in varying degrees. However, while Single Touch only gave us an option to choose between First Touch or Last Touch, it did urge us to think in the right direction.



And that began with narrowing our scope of attribution to derive more accurate insights. Are we keen on finding out what makes our customers complete that purchase or are we curious about the channels through which our customers are learning about our brand? Can the purchase on your specialty pet beds e-commerce business be attributed entirely to the expensive Google search ad that brought your customer to your website? Or should you attribute it to the first Instagram reel that went viral when you had a local celebrity reshare it? The former would be a classic Last-Touch attribution model which is ideal when you’re looking for the inflection point of a person making the purchase. And the latter, the First-Touch model, is an excellent way to find your best-performing brand awareness channels.

But if you think back to your last online purchase—let’s say it was an air fryer—was it just one thing that finally made you buy the mid-range yet expensive one versus the one that would meet all your needs? Most buyers know it is never just a single thing that directs the decision. So why do we continue using the Single-Touch attribution model in our businesses? Because accurate data collection is difficult, offline data in particular. And if you have only a few channels, Single Touch often suffices.

Picking the Most Suitable Attribution Mode: Getting Started

  1. Begin by collecting and organizing your data. In which places does your data reside? Ideally, all your data must have a unifying common denominator. For example, in case of some CRM systems, it can be email addresses or phone numbers.
  2. Once we have that data collated and sanitized, we can now decide the scope of our attribution and stage of the buyers’ journey. This is based on our questions for the data.
  3. Next, apply and compare several models to pick the one that gives the most amount of insight for that scope. Marketers often make the mistake of assuming that “one size fits all” when it comes to attribution models. Hence, it is important to think about your product, the length of your buying cycle, and the stage of the buying cycle you are interested in. Then, pick the attribution model that is the least wrong.

To identify this least-wrong model, learn about the different attribution models and ask the following questions. What is each attribution model best suited for? For what scope and which buyer stage does it help drive insights?

Now, let’s therefore explore attribution models in detail.

Single-Touch Attribution Models

Under Single Touch, we can further break down the models based on touchpoints and interactions. “Touchpoints” are very intuitively the points where your brand “touches” your audience. This could be ads, product placements, or even massive billboards. Not all are easily measured, especially when the channels are offline. “Interactions” on the other hand involve an active interest from your audience in the form of a click, form submission, or a chat at a tradeshow.

First-Touch Attribution Model

This attribution model gives 100% of the weightage to the original source. While great at helping us identify what attracts people to your website, it overemphasizes top-of-the-funnel activities. Unless you are a content marketing company, wrong usage of this model might lead you to waste more money on content creation while your down-the-funnel conversion rates are still not optimized. It is very useful if you have a long buying cycle and you’d like to find out what source helped in incepting the idea.

First-Interaction Attribution Model

Differing from the above by crediting 100% weightage to the first interaction. This refers to explicit interest expressed in the form of a form submission, click through, or formal hand raise. Again, it is a great choice to understand how people first discovered your brand and generate “awareness-stage” leads worth nurturing over time. If you are a business that lands and expands the customer footprint over time, this model will help identify which campaigns help attract net new customers. This is especially useful if you manage a high volume of deals and your sales pipeline is wide.

Last-Touch Attribution Model

This model attributes confusingly to the first touchpoint of the most recent visit or often called the latest source. It is an excellent choice if you are looking to measure what triggers the quick purchase on a short buying cycle—think e-commerce. However, it is very problematic if you oversubscribe to Google Ads due to a high conversion rate based on a last-touch attribution model. Nevertheless, it is a good option for businesses with limited marketing channels.

Last-Interaction Attribution Model

This focuses on the last time a customer actively engaged with your brand that led to a conversion event. It is a good model for measuring effectiveness of landing pages, or identifying the value of actions taken at the bottom of the sales funnel. Businesses with lots of leads but very low sales conversion rate will benefit from analyzing this model.

Pro Tip: You always have the option to mix different models for different parts of the conversion path. A good practice is to start tagging or naming the campaigns based on which part of the conversion path it is at and with the model you’d like to use. For example, Acquisition (First Touch) or Closed Won Conversion (Last Touch).

Multi-Touch Attribution Models

What is Management

Marketing automation and advanced analytics platforms democratize the usage of Multi-Touch attribution. This is because you no longer need huge investments to be able to capture and analyze marketing data. For that competitive edge and to decipher complex customer journeys, let’s dive into a few of the Multi-Touch attribution models.

Linear Attribution

Linear, as the name suggests, adds equal credit to all marketing interactions whether it is an in-person event or a landing page, irrespective of the time and money investment. It is a great option when looking at a holistic view. However, it is definitely not ideal to analyze the efficacy of granular campaigns and assets. It will not be able to tell you if your trade shows are more effective than a highly segmented email campaign or a 20-page website. If you narrow down your scope to the customers in the consideration phase, you might find some good insights.

Time-Decay Attribution

The principle of this attribution model is that we credit the most recent touchpoints more than those in the past. Theoretically, we assign credit with weighted average to the last few touchpoints with a half life of seven days. However, it is a flexible model where you can choose a steeper or a gentler decay depending on the complexity of your purchase. It helps you identify the best touchpoint near the end of a buying cycle, especially if the buying cycle is very long. Ig is also perfect to track seasonal campaigns with short-term touchpoints or time-limited campaigns in e-commerce. Think drop campaigns in apparels with a definite start and end date to the campaign.

Position Based / U-Shaped 

This model, also lovingly referred to as the Bathtub Model, gives higher (40%) credit to the first touch, like seeing a search ad and another 40% to the last touch—such as a call-to-action button on your website. The remaining (20% in this case) is equally distributed across the different touchpoints in between. This includes marketing emails or webpage visits. The U-shaped model is a good option for businesses that want to generate top-of-the-funnel prospects that match their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and focus on nurturing and qualifying them later over time. It is not an ideal choice if you are analyzing middle- and bottom-of-the-funnel activities. This is because the model ignores any interactions after a contact is created.

W-Shaped

Continuing our alphabet-themed position models, the W-shaped model assigns higher credit (say 30%) to the first interaction, to the last interaction before lead creation, and to the last interaction before opportunity creation. The remaining (10%) is equally distributed amongst the rest. This is a better alternative to the U-shaped model if you have many top-of-the-funnel channels to generate leads but very few touchpoints between being a lead and to becoming a customer. The biggest difference in comparison to the U-shaped model is that it also gives weightage to your nurturing activities—which, depending on the business, can be email marketing or a salesperson-driven process.

Full Path

The last model in our series is the Full Path, which assigns focus equally across the entire funnel. It is therefore perfect for sales and marketing alignment. Taking it one step forward from the W-shaped model is that we also credit several touchpoints in the middle of the journey. An example would be to assign 22.5% to the first interaction, 22.5% to lead creation, 22.5% to deal creation, 22.5% to last interaction, and the remaining 10% distributed equally. If you have robust data and analysis infrastructure (both technology and talent) with lots of different channels, this model is the perfect one for sales and marketing alignment.

Appendix

Attribution Model

  • Set of rules for assigning credit to various touchpoints
  • Fractional attribution
  • Depending on the product + length of the buying cycle
  • Before Everything relying on last click—after thinking about what model fits where

Getting Started

  1. Make sure you have all your data organized
  2. Select the stage are you interested in—first touch to MQL, last touch from lead to purchase
  3. Depending on the question you want to answer
  4.  
  5. “Pick the attribution model that’s the least wrong”

AI models with GA 4

Comparisons

Last Non-Direct Click vs First Interaction

  • Bring new customers vs bringing traffic
  • Search ads—will choose last non-direct click
  • Purchase funnel—First Interaction

First Interaction vs Last Interaction

  • Lots of differences
  • They might be different campaigns across different parts of the conversion path
  • Start tagging the campaigns as Acquisition (first touch) vs Conversion at the end of the path (last touch)

Linear vs Last Non-Direct Click

  • Lot of difference between these (all except the direct channel)

Linear vs Time Decay

  • Almost similar values

Linear vs Position Based

  • Almost

NOTE: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of Emeritus.

About the Author

Senior Solutions Engineer. Hubspot
Megha is passionate about helping businesses uncover their challenges and find the right technologies to tackle them. She started off working with startups across APAC, moving over to sales and business development roles within the tech industry across several customer-obsessed organizations like Tableau, HubSpot, and OutSystems. Megha's expertise and versatility have been honed through diverse experiences across bustling cities like Singapore, Dubai, and she now calls Amsterdam home. She's also mentored and coached several professionals to navigate their next career step in customer-facing tech roles. When she's not strategizing business, you'll likely find her surrounded by her three adorable kitties or performing improv comedy because she believes humor is the key to a life well lived.
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