14 Mar Why you should use multi-channel attribution?

Attribution is a lot like scoring points in a basketball game. It takes more than one player to score a basket. A player manages to score a point only because others assisted in the conversion. Similarly, marketing channels can be considered as players, where some assist whilst others covert. Therefore, understanding the value of each channel is critical in achieving the overall strategic goal.

According to Econsultancy and Datalicious, two in three company respondents do not carry out any form of marketing attribution beyond the traditional last click analysis method.

Traditional methods such as last-click completely ignore the potential contribution of other touch points in the conversion cycle. For instance, a customer receives an electronic marketing mail regarding the purchase of a product. Before making the final purchase he decides to search for a coupon code and clicks on the display ad served by an affiliate, which in this case becomes the last touch point. However, should the display ad be attributed with the maximum credit?

Marketers prefer last-click or first-click attribution as their preferred model. By focusing purely on last click or even first-click attribution, one can expect a lower point of diminished returns, higher cost per acquisition, slower growth and most importantly misrepresented metrics such as higher session conversion rates and lower site-wide bounce rates leading to inaccurate information.

On the contrary, marketers believe that a combination of search and display ad campaigns provide a better return on investment than focusing on simply one channel.

In order to gain valuable insights, it is essential to develop and change the attribution model based on the objectives of the campaign.

Custom modelling is the most effective form of media attribution among APAC marketers. With custom modelling tools, the marketer is able to benefit from linear, first, last, time decay and position based models as their starting point.

Leveraging on that framework marketers can account for other factors based on the objective of the campaigns to create a more personalised attribution model.

In our opinion, it is important to have a personalised attribution model to provide clear and accurate insights into where, when and how the marketing strategy influences consumers across devices and channels.

Read our article on AI Advertising with Google that looks at Google Analytics attribution tools.