Attribution modeling: definition, types, and tools

Imagine you’re a marketing team: how do you know which channels and touchpoints in your customer journey are driving conversions? How do you decide where to direct your efforts and budget so you invest in the most engaging and profitable campaigns?

Whether you’re spending your efforts on content marketing, mobile, or another medium, you need to be able to rank each channel’s influence on buying decisions to know which campaigns to focus on.

In this chapter, you’ll understand how attribution modeling works and how you can make it work for your business. You’ll understand

• What attribution modeling is, and why it’s beneficial

• The different attribution model types—and which one is right for your business

• Which tools to use for attribution modeling

What is attribution modeling?

Attribution modeling is the process of allocating relative value to every marketing touchpoint across all offline and online channels so you can see which efforts are generating the highest sales returns. 

While vanity metrics like total clicks and open rates are super easy to track, the critical data that tells you which touchpoints of the customer journey assisted a sale is best obtained via attribution models.

Recognizing the impact of each marketing channel and touchpoint in the customer journey is critical because it helps you

1. Understand which of your marketing activities are working (and not working)

2. Allocate your budget wisely

3. Discover the optimal number of interactions needed to drive a sale

However, to reap these benefits, you must ensure you’re applying the right attribution model type (or types). 

Why marketing attribution models matter

Nowadays, there’s an abundance of touchpoints to account for, from online advertising, print ads, and TV commercials to social media posts, video tutorials, in-person events, and customer reviews.

This makes measuring the impact of each step in the buying cycle increasingly challenging—and means mapping out your entire customer journey before you pick an attribution model type is essential.

That’s because the best attribution models will differ depending on a range of factors such as the length of your customer journey, where in the journey particular touchpoints sit, and so on.

Here are the different attribution models available to your business.

What are the key types of attribution models?

Single-touch attribution models

These attribution models, also known as first-touch attribution models, assign 100% of attribution credit to a single touchpoint or source in your journey. 

This makes them easy to use and interpret. However, it also limits them and potentially makes them misleading if improperly deployed or focused on the exclusion of the rest of the journey.

1. First click

In this attribution model, the first touchpoint gets 100% credit for the sale. 

For example, if a customer finds your brand through a Facebook ad, that Facebook ad gets all the credit for any conversion that occurs after the first interaction. 

First click is most effective for marketing campaigns and sales cycles limited to 1 or 2 activities and to a short time period. For example, B2B sales cycles, which typically stretch across weeks (if not months), are unlikely to be fairly represented by first-click attribution.

First click is also great for identifying which channels or campaigns drive awareness—helping you gauge the success of your ad campaigns.

2. Last click (or ‘Last touch’)

Like first click, the last-click attribution model assigns 100% of the credit to a single touchpoint—only this time, it’s the final touchpoint before a conversion. 

For example, if a customer discovers your website through a Facebook ad and later uses your mobile app to buy your product or service, all of the credit will be attributed to the mobile app, as the last interaction. 

Last-click attribution helps companies discover the ‘deciding factor’ that generated a conversion. This model is particularly useful when customer journeys are short and the path to conversion is straightforward. 

For longer, more complex journeys, last click can skew results.

Multi-touch attribution models

Multi-touch attribution models aim to account for all the different touchpoints in a journey and assign them value in terms of influence.

With today’s customer journeys tending to be complex and encompassing numerous channels and touchpoints, multi-touch attribution models are arguably more relevant than single-touch models for most businesses. 

They’re also more useful for assessing the success of your overall marketing strategy. 

1. Linear

The linear attribution model ensures every touchpoint in the customer journey gets equal credit.

For example, if a customer finds your website through Google, joins your email list, and clicks the link in your lead magnet to make a purchase, the linear model will credit all 3 channels. 

With this model, no touchpoint is overlooked, helping you determine the overall return on investment (ROI) of your branding efforts and optimize the entire customer journey rather than just 1 activity.  

On the other hand, because the linear model assigns the same credit to every touchpoint, regardless of its value, it offers limited insights into where you specifically need to optimize.

2. Time decay

In the time decay model, the channels closest to the conversion point get the most credit, while the channels present at the beginning of the customer journey receive less credit. 

For example, if someone sees your brand on Instagram and then goes to a landing page on your website and ends up becoming a paying customer, the landing page will receive significantly more credit than Instagram. 

As with linear modeling, Time decay modeling recognizes the importance of every touchpoint leading up to a conversion, but it also weighs the touchpoints that directly preceded conversion more heavily. 

This means you can identify touchpoints that drive conversions or indicate a likelihood of future conversions. But, it also means that early customer journey touchpoints can get undervalued. 

3. Position based

In a position-based attribution model, the first and last touchpoints of a buyer’s journey receive 80% of the credit collectively (40% each), while the remaining 20% is applied evenly to all the channels in the middle. 

For example, a customer sees your brand in Google’s search listings, visits your website and joins your email list. A week later, they see a Facebook ad for your products and make a purchase. In this case, Google Search and the Facebook ad receive the most credit, while your website and email marketing activity will get partial credit. 

Position-based attribution modeling combines the best of linear and time decay modeling, accounting for every step in the journey while still recognizing the importance of first and last touches.

There’s one issue here, though: the outsized credit that first and last touches could receive. A first touch is undoubtedly important, but it won’t always deserve 40% of the credit for a conversion.

What’s the right marketing attribution model for your business?

As with most things, there’s no ‘perfect’ attribution model out there. But certain models fit certain businesses better than others.

Assess various factors related to your customer journeys—including the number of channels, customer journey, and length of the buying cycle—to determine the best attribution model for your business.

For companies dealing with longer, multi-touch customer journeys, a position-based or time decay attribution model is likely the most ideal and flexible. 

Both tell the story for long conversion paths; the longer it takes for prospects to convert, the greater the likelihood the customer journey is complicated and might include competitor analysis, retargeting, and email reminders down the road.

By contrast, marketers dealing with shorter buying cycles will likely find single-touch models like first click and last touch attribution more useful for measuring direct response and brand awareness campaigns. 

With that said, a hybrid approach is likely to deliver the best insights, and the more you A/B test and optimize, the closer you’ll get to an attribution model that works.

3 attribution modeling tools to optimize your key touchpoints and channels 

You’ll need help with all that testing and optimization just mentioned, so here are 3 tools that work wonders for your attribution modeling.

1. Attribution App for multi-touch attribution

Attribution App offers enterprise-grade multi-touch attribution for B2C and B2B marketers, making it easy for businesses to understand the true impact of each touchpoint across the entire marketing funnel.

• Automatically collect data from ad platforms and your MarTech stack, and combine online and offline touchpoints with budget spend to create a single source of attribution truth

• Use machine learning-powered multi-touch attribution models to uncover connections, identify patterns, and deliver unbiased attribution results

• Measure, compare, manage, enroll, and reward affiliates for a higher return on affiliate spend

• Segment and drill down into data with intuitive dashboards and reporting to understand how specific users engage with your brand at specific points in time

2. Invoca for ensuring phone calls get attributed

If your business has (or is) a contact center and you want to get attribution for the phone conversions your marketing campaigns are driving, Invoca could be the solution you need. 

• Get visibility of the entire journey from click, to call, to conversion

• See which channels are best at driving phone leads

• Track calls for granular attribution data to find out how customers interact with your campaigns and website before they pick up the phone

• Drive more high-value sales calls by streaming conversion data from phone calls to virtually any ad platform to optimize your campaigns and keyword bidding 

3. Adjust for mobile app attribution

Adjust offers robust attribution for app teams across Android and iOS devices. 

• View and compare channels, apps and campaigns in a single place, enabling you to accurately measure marketing efforts and prove ROI

• Identify top users and marketing mixes with granular insights that help you pin-point which campaigns and creatives are delivering the most for you

• Connect the dots on monetary metrics with accurate attribution data and a holistic view of your marketing spend

Improve your attribution process with Contentsquare

To get attribution modeling right, you’ll first and foremost need a comprehensive picture of your customer journey to work with. 

And a customer journey map is easy to draw up with Contentsquare. 

The experience intelligence platform autocaptures 100% of user behavior on your website, apps, and other branded experiences, and gives you the investigative tools you need to analyze that data and optimize accordingly.

This behavioral data lets you determine which attribution model type will give credit where credit’s due—to the channels and touchpoints that deserve it most.