Patrick Biddiscombe explains attribution modeling: a system for assigning credit to each touchpoint in a customer's path to purchase. Different models weight interactions differently—first-touch credits the initial visit, last-touch credits the final click, linear splits credit equally. Knowing which model fits your business helps you spend marketing money on channels that actually drive sales.
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A customer can have hundreds of interactions with a brand before ever making a single purchase. Sure, you might know what landing page a customer converted on, but what about all the social posts, content and site pages that also influence their decision to buy? All these interactions should change how you allocate resources so you can maximize roi. But this complex buyer's journey makes your job harder, and it means you need a more sophisticated way to measure what channels and assets are creating sales opportunities. That's why marketers are relying on attribution modeling. Attribution modeling is a set of rules for assigning credit to the various touch points in the conversion path. It helps marketers understand trends and how prospects move through the path to purchase. There are a couple different attribution models out there, and depending on the product you sell and the length of your buying cycle, one might make more sense than the other. Let's go over a few of the most common types. First touch attribution is where 100% of the credit is assigned to the page that originally drove a visitor to your site. This model does overemphasize top of the funnel marketing efforts, but it's an easy way to know what exactly is attracting people to your brand. Last touch attribution signals out the first touch point of the most recent visit. So if a visitor views a blog post, clicks a CTA, and converts on a landing page, the blog post will receive the credit. The last interaction model gives credit to the touchpoint where a conversion directly occurred. Use this to determine the effectiveness of your landing pages. The first and last interaction model gives equal credit to the first and last touch points. A simple decay attribution model assigns a weighted percentage of the credit to the most recent touch points. Use this if your buying cycle is short, as it assumes that the assets a prospect interacted with closer to the time of sale are the most important important in the purchase decision. The linear attribution model gives equal credit to every interaction during the buyer's journey, so an in person event is given the same weight as a click on a banner ad. Multichannel attribution modeling can be complex, but you won't truly know if you're spending your time and resources on the right marketing activities without it.
