What is marketing attribution?

The marketing attribution process determines which of your marketing strategies generates traffic, leads, or conversions. It helps you increase brand awareness, for example, by tracking your marketing progress. You can also use marketing attribution to view how your social media campaign impacted sales.

There are a few different ways you can measure marketing attribution. You can use analytics tools or platforms, like Google Analytics to view the sources of your web traffic, leads, and conversions.

Why Is Marketing Attribution Important?

• It helps in tracking the results of your marketing campaigns
• You can exactly pinpoint what is driving the most traffic to your website. You can figure out if your Blogs are generating sign-ups or if your Search Engine Optimization strategies are working and driving traffic to your website.
• Figuring out the Marketing attributions helps you in making improvements in your business website and strategies that in turn provide you with better results.
• For example, imagine you are running a Pay-Per-Click ad and you are getting Click-throughs on the ad. Through the marketing attribution tool, you were able to see that there is a major drop in the users who are visiting your landing page. After running a few tests you find out that the landing page loading speed is not that good and also the content on the page might not be very engaging. You then further optimize your page and add in more engaging content which in turn helps the click-throughs to turn into conversions.

What are marketing attribution tools?

Attribution tools aid in determining the effectiveness of digital advertising campaigns and other marketing channels. They act as a bridge between your marketing tools and your website, app, or other owned endpoints, determining which acquisition sources are driving conversion and providing you with a thorough, full-story view of your customer journey.

Attribution tracking is the method through which attribution tools collect information on consumer touchpoints. After gathering data, attribution tools analyze it to establish the importance of touchpoints in generating the ultimate conversion. For example, Is the Facebook ad that started the customer journey more essential than the paid search ad that eventually led to a conversion? These sorts of problems can be answered via attribution modeling.

💡Teal Tip: Marketing attribution tools are a must-have for modern businesses. It enables you to determine which marketing touchpoints have the most influence on leads and revenue. The finest attribution software helps you to examine your marketing activities through the perspective of several attribution models and make data-driven decisions to boost ROI.

If you're simply measuring conversions through Google Analytics and not linking clicks to purchases, marketing attribution tools can help you raise your game.

The marketing attribution model is used for determining how sales and conversions are attributed to specific touchpoints. During a customer's journey to purchase your products or services, they encounter touchpoints. Touchpoints include email, contact forms, and phone calls, for example.

Marketing Attribution

Types of Marketing Attribution Models

There are various types of marketing attribution models that help in tracking your marketing strategies that further help in growing your business. 

Types of Marketing Attribution models:

Which Model Is Best For Your Business?

With tools similar to google analytics you can easily switch from views to analyze your results from different models at any time.

That being said, you might want to focus on one or two specific attribution models. Choosing the best model for your business can depend on your current needs and goals.

You will be hearing and coming across a lot of different types of strategies that will help you in growing your business. It can become a bit overwhelming at times to figure out the right form of strategy for your business. The above are suggested strategies that you can test out first for your specific goals/needs.

Ideally, there is no right answer to what is the right business attribution for your business. Because at the end of the day the only suitable attribution model is one that gives you useful information to help you raise the ROI of your business. Consider trying all of the attribution models: first-click or last-click attribution, linear, position-based, time-decay, data-driven, and last Google Analytics Assisted Conversion.

But the best way would be to try out the strategies in batches first, see their effectiveness, and then pivot according to the results. This is a much easier way to test things out and improve gradually. 

Some marketers will swear by one model, while others will swear by another.

This is due to the fact that each model functions well in its own capacity. And in many scenarios.

As a result, don't be hesitant to experiment with various attribution models to see which works best for your company and marketing initiatives. You may discover that the solution is not what you expected.

How do you measure and report marketing attribution on Google Analytics?

There are different ways through which you can measure and report marketing attribution; it depends on what tool you are using. For example, if you are using Google Analytics as your attribution tool then you can go to the ‘Acquisition’ option on the left side and check out the ‘Overview’.

You will be able to find the data relating to where the traffic on your website comes from.  Google Analytics is also a good way to get a lot of other attributions like viewing the sources of your web traffic, leads, and conversions. Here in the above image, you can look at various sources through which you know where your website traffic is coming from. Like here most of the traffic is coming directly to the website. Therefore, this means that the customers are familiar with your brand and don’t need a search result or referral link to find you. This is a good sign. You can optimize the landing pages of your website and check out the customer journeys, work on Search Engine Optimizations (SEO), and since the social media reach is the lowest work on nurturing your social media.

Why might Google Analytics alone not be enough?

Dedicated attribution systems often employ multi-touch attribution, which gives a more comprehensive view of the customer experience as a whole. Because general analytics systems, such as Google Analytics, and ad platforms, such as Facebook, cannot do multi-touch attribution, companies must rely on first- or last-touch attribution, which only considers single, restricted touchpoints. In the above example, first-touch attribution would attribute the entire final conversion to the Facebook ad, but last-touch would attribute the entire conversion to the paid search ad.

The breakdown in GA's ability to appropriately allocate conversion credit is due to referral URLs, which are the links that users clicked on to get to your website before making a purchase. These links are used by GA to classify conversions. However, if GA is unable to track the connection back to Facebook for whatever reason, it will designate it as an organic search or anything else that neatly gives Google credit by default.

Therefore, you need to have alternate tracking tools set up for your business.

What are first-party and alternate tracking data?

Why is it critical to comprehend the many forms of data? Today, data is one of the most important drivers of effective marketing. In this section, you will be learning about first-party and alternate ways of tracking data. 

First-Party

First-party data is the most important since it comes directly from your audience and consumers. Not only is it the most valuable, but it is also free, making it the most cost-effective. It's also rather simple to gather and maintain, particularly if you utilize an audience management tool.

Here are some common first party tracking tools.

Tool Name: Google Analytics

Description

Google Analytics is a platform that collects data from your websites and apps to create reports that provide insights into your business.

Use Case

Google Analytics is used to identify trends and patterns in how visitors engage with their websites. Features enable data collection, analysis, monitoring, visualization, reporting and integration with other applications.

Real-Time Reporting

Google Analytics real-time reporting feature allows you to monitor your website in real time.

This feature will let you view your live website traffic, the pages which are currently attracting customers, and where they arrived from. You can also measure your campaigns, events, and social media posts’ performance and if they’re driving traffic to your website or not.

Average Visit Duration/Bounce Rate

To improve your bounce rate, you can calculate the average time spent and bounce rate by implementing Google Analytics to your website, reducing your page load time, optimizing your website’s design, and sharing good content for customers’ satisfaction.

Insights Report

The Google Analytics Insights report lets you see your metrics as a snapshot.

Understand Website Visitors

This metric measures how many of your site visits are from first-time visitors or returning visitors, and is an indicator of marketing performance for new acquisitions. This is an important KPI to measure the ‘stickiness’ of your site, or whether your site has enough of a pull factor for multiple visits.

Costing

Free

Why do we prefer this tool

Google Analytics is one of the top, most powerful tools out there for monitoring and analyzing traffic on your website. It gives you an enormous amount of information about who is visiting your site, what they are looking for, and how they are getting to your site.

Alternatives and cost

Mix Panels

$$

Woopra

$$$

Fox Metrics

$$$

Second-Party

Second-party data is essentially someone's first-party data, with whom you trust and collaborate to improve your data segments and broaden your reach. A telecom operator, for example, collaborates with a streaming service provider to boost client retention or perform acquisition marketing.

Third-party

Any data you get that is not your own is referred to as third-hand data. The information you acquire is often the same, but the effort was done by someone else. It usually entails acquiring data from another firm, collaborating with another company for mutual advantage, and/or investigating existing information.

Here are some common third-party tracking tools.

Tool Name- Triple Whale

Description

Triple Whale is a marketing solution that aims to provide organizations with superior financial, reporting, and ROI insights.

Use Cases

The Triple Whale platform combines centralization, visualization, and attribution in an easy-to-use dashboard that presents and illustrates KPIs in a simple and actionable way, making sophisticated insights into advertising performance accessible for any advertiser.

Costing: $$

Why do we prefer this tool

It's an all-in-one, customizable dashboard that shows key metrics from all integrated software and automatically pulls data from integrated platforms to show key insights. Dashboards can be placed on other platforms and websites Offers advanced reporting and predictive analytics features Better attribution features than other advertising platforms.

Alternatives and cost:

Thought Metrics $$

Wicked Reports $$$

Kissmetrics

Description

KISSmetrics delivers key insights and user interaction on your website. It defines a clear picture of users' activities on your website and collects acquisition data of every visitor.

Kissmetrics as a Web Analytics Tool

Through this tool, you can observe what is leading website users to perform conversions and, in the event that they are not performing them, remove the obstacles that prevent them from meeting the objectives. It also helps to understand the indicators of commitment and churn, so you can react accordingly and increase your retention. With this tool, it is easier to understand the behavior of customers, something necessary to improve growth and lead the company to its growth.

Use Cases

Kissmetrics is used to identify, understand, and improve the metrics that drive your online business. We make it simple to get the information you need to make better product and marketing decisions.

Costing: $$$

Why do we prefer this tool

Kissmetrics deep tracking enables users to get significant insights from customers at the deepest levels so that they could be better understood even before a purchase is made.

Alternatives and cost:

Mix Panels $$

When should you consider getting an alternate tracking tool?

Every advertiser does media buying on different online platforms apart from google, and GA is not reliable to track performance on the different platforms we work on. There you need an alternate tracking tool that gives accurate data that will help you to analyze the data and optimize the performance of your campaigns.

Recommended third-party tracking tools

Marketing attribution tools provide reliable data that you can use as the basis for your marketing decisions. Choosing the tool can get overwhelming and a very tedious process. That's why we have produced this reliable marketing attribution tool list, which includes a variety of high-quality products and explains what each performs well for their target audience. Here are the tools we recommend.

‍