According to a customer survey, a user is exposed 36 times (on average) to a brand through social media and other digital ad campaigns, before they end up making a purchase. However, for an advertiser, it is often difficult to understand the journey of buyers before they make a purchase. That’s where marketing attribution finds its use case. It gives deeper visibility to marketers and pinpoints the channels that are most and least effective in engaging users or driving sales. No matter how complicated it sounds, it is fairly easy to set up your own marketing attribution framework if you have a measurement partner like Trackier Mobile Marketing Platform. Sounds interesting? Let’s know more about it!

What Is Marketing Attribution?

Attribution in marketing is a process of identifying different touchpoints of a user journey and analyzing the value of these touchpoints in leading to a conversion. You can say it's an analytical process of identifying the contributions made by each technique, asset, or channel in your marketing and advertising strategy.  It’s an objective way to look at your marketing efforts and understand what model implements the decisions you envision with your brand.  

For example, take an imaginary funnel where the first touchpoint was an influencer campaign i.e. you ran a campaign through an influencer and that’s how the new user finds out about your brand’s offering. After some time, the user again saw your product advertisement on a Facebook campaign which piqued their interest in you and they searched for you on Google through organic search and that's how they purchased the product on your website.

Depending on the software that you use for marketing analytics you will see different infographics about the conversion and which channel contributed to this conversion. Google Analytics will point toward organic search or search ads because it was one of the last paid clicks. Meanwhile, FB can point out that since there was a click on the Facebook ad, the conversion occurred due to an in-app campaign. 

Now you may ask who ensures safe attribution ad tracking? Well, this is done by third-party tools which not only show whether Facebook or Google made the conversion but also highlight the role played by different channels in the entire process. From an advertiser’s viewpoint, we can see the response of our prospects to the various touchpoints in the marketing funnel, correlating their efficacy to the projections. It also helps to demystify what’s going on in the funnel, in terms of the unforeseen bottlenecks, suspicious activity, partner performance, etc. The two main components of a marketing attribution framework are:

• Touchpoints: Any platform that allows an interaction between the business/brand, and the customer. Recognizing your average advertising touchpoints is not enough. You have to pay attention to a customer’s path from being a random prospect to a paying customer, in order to set up a funnel that fulfills their queries, offers assistance in the right time, and delivers tailored offers. 

• Conversion: The conversion process incorporates tens and hundreds of individual interactions where the customer engages with the brand one way or the other. Conversion could be as simple as visiting a landing page, signing up, following the brand or business on social media, or reaching out for a sales call. You can also have multiple conversion points in the same funnel if your business follows a longer sales cycle. 

Benefits Of Marketing Attribution for Mobile Marketers

• The ultimate benefit of marketing attribution is a high return on investment or ROI which can be achieved by personalizing ad campaigns as per the responses of your target audience.
• From the customer’s perspective, attribution marketing leads to a better and more personalized experience. If attribution is done correctly, it can help determine the user’s online behavior.
• In an affiliate marketing network, attribution assists in establishing a performance-based system that accounts for each partner’s role in busines growth.

Different Types of Marketing Attribution Models

• The First Click Attribution model allocates 100% of the credit to the channel that made a user land on your desired landing page/website. It records top-of-the-funnel marketing tactics but makes sure that the advertiser knows where what makes a user interact with your brand.
• The Last Touch Attribution model emphasizes the value of the last touchpoint or the most recent platform that the user visited before a conversion. Suppose, a visitor saw a beauty product banner ad on her social media feed and later in the mobile web before clicking on it, and making a purchase. The web ad will receive the credit for making the conversion.
• The Last Interaction Attribution model gives full credit to the touchpoint where a conversion has directly occurred. This model is used to determine the effectiveness of your landing page. 
• The First and Last Attribution model finds itself giving equal credit to the first and last touchpoints of a user journey i.e. the platform that generated brand awareness and the channel that nudged for purchase.
• The Simple Decay Attribution model stacks the percentage of the credit from the first to the last touchpoint based on their efficiency in driving sales. 
• The Linear Attribution model gives equal credit to every interaction during the buyer’s journey. For example, an in-app event is given the same weight as a click on a web advertisementt.
• The Multi-channel Attribution model can be complex but you won’t truly know if you’re spending your time and resources on the right marketing activities without it. It is a more strategic approach that allows marketers to allot different weightage to each touchpoint based on their historical record and current campaign response. 

Summing It Up

We hope we have answered the evergreen question of what is attribution marketing. In short, it is a reporting strategy that pinpoints the factors and touchpoints that led to conversion. Attribution marketing tool is of great use for advertisers and marketers like you because it helps to streamline the data effectively and understand what works best to achieve your business goals.