Football coaches look at the individual performances of their players to optimize their line-up and increase their chance of winning. The same should count for marketers who want to optimize their digital media: to score more conversions, you first need to analyze your channels.
Attribution models help measure which media channels contributed to a conversion. Or, in football terms: which player helped score a goal. Let’s look at an example: Belgium’s perfect last-minute goal against Japan at the World Cup football of 2018.
Corner for Japan. Courtois catches the ball and launches De Bruyne. He sprints 50 meters and gives it wide. Meunier crosses, Lukaku dummies perfectly and Chadli scores one of the most beautiful counter attacks in the history of football.
Now, if you had to say who made that goal, would you say Chadli? Would you give Meunier some credit too? Or would you say that Courtois, De Bruyne and Lukaku all made a considerable contribution?
A single-touch attribution model will only give credit to one player. There are two different types of single-touch attribution models:
Multi-touch models give a more nuanced look at the goal or conversion. They reflect all of the actions that led up to the goal, or every step of the customer journey:
If you look at Belgium’s goal against Japan, you’ll see that Debruyne ran the greatest distance with the ball. And Lukaku didn’t touch it, but his dummy did throw off 3 Japanese players. Much like a video view might raise awareness without converting immediately.
Lukaku didn’t touch the ball, but he threw off 3 players.
Much like a video view might raise awareness without converting.
In other words: conversions, just like football goals, are complex. Custom-made attribution models allow you to deconstruct that complexity by taking different parameters into account. They give credit to whatever you consider important: time on channel, interactions, etc.
Custom-made models can be optimized constantly. The perfect job for... artificial intelligence. Data-driven attribution models use machine learning to evaluate all channels, constantly optimizing the current hypothesis.
Today, many marketers still use the last-click attribution model by default. While most conversions don’t happen overnight or thanks to one channel.
It’s only by experimenting with multi-touch and custom-made attribution models that you’ll discover which model best represents the customer journey.
But your work doesn’t stop there. Once you find the most suitable attribution model, you still have to interpret the data. Deep-dives into your digital channels are a good jumping-off point. And maybe you’ll learn to never bench Lukaku again.
Need some help figuring out which attribution model would benefit your business? Don’t hesitate to reach out.