***
Sure, you might know what landing page a customer converted on … but what about all the social posts, content, and site pages that also influenced 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 touchpoints in the conversion path. It helps marketers understand trends in 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 singles out the first touchpoint 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 touchpoints.
A simple decay attribution model assigns a weighted percentage of the credit to the most recent touchpoints. 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 most 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.
Multi-channel 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.