Marketing attribution is the process of assigning credit for each action — like a sale, event, touchpoint, or other conversion — to the marketing activity that drove it.
There are a number of different ways to track attribution in marketing, which can make it a little complicated to figure out for your business.
But it doesn’t have to be. Here, we’ll simplify marketing attribution perspectives, best practices, and benefits to help you allocate resources more effectively and get more out of your marketing budget. Keep reading for everything you need to know to confidently answer the common question: What is attribution in marketing?
Marketing attribution is an analytical process that assigns credit for each conversion to the marketing touchpoints that drove it. It’s also sometimes called lead attribution.
Those conversions can be sales, newsletter signups, downloads, or any other desired action you identify for your customers. The touchpoints that drive conversions can be any number of marketing channels, like organic search, display ads, and email.
For example, your customer may first see your ads on YouTube and Instagram, but only make a purchase after engaging with your email newsletter. Or perhaps they hear your ad on their favorite podcast and migrate immediately to organic search.
By understanding and tracking customer behavior across these and other touchpoints, you can optimize your campaign spending to invest more in the channels that perform and create targeted campaigns for the segments that respond most positively on those channels.
Think of attribution in marketing as a way to answer key questions that help you optimize campaign performance, such as:
Marketing attribution helps you understand the effectiveness of your campaigns. Here are the big benefits of marketing attribution to consider:
Those benefits undoubtedly sound good, but marketing attribution isn’t without its challenges.
Here are some limitations and mistakes to keep in mind:
Attribution models (more on those below) by default examine what happened in the past and why. They can’t tell you why a specific campaign isn’t working or how to improve that campaign’s performance in the future. You can’t forgo creative problem-solving and critical thinking just because you have some data.
For example, say you’re running ads on Facebook, Pinterest, and Google. After running an attribution model, you discover that the Pinterest spend is more profitable than you thought, and the Facebook spend is just about breaking even.
Using this insight, you can see what happens when you pull back on your Facebook budget slightly and invest those dollars in Pinterest. The model won’t tell you what to do once Facebook and Pinterest both break even. And it won’t tell you what to do if Facebook suddenly becomes unprofitable when you haven’t changed your investment or campaign strategy.
You can’t always be exactly sure you’re attributing correctly because certain biases are unavoidable. For example, there’s no way to account in your marketing attribution for a customer who was planning to purchase your product whether or not they saw your Facebook ad.
You also can’t factor in the fact that correlation is not causation. Just because a customer opened your newsletter and later followed you on Instagram, they may have done so because a colleague recommended you, not because they read your email.
Lag time between engaging with your brand and converting can throw off your attribution insights. Imagine a customer who sees your Instagram ad but decides to wait to make a purchase until after their next payday. It’s not always clear what to attribute that conversion to after a 10-day wait, and making assumptions can skew your data.
Traditional attribution modeling models can capture the effects of outlier situations like the COVID-19 pandemic in hindsight, but not necessarily while they are occurring. And the conclusions drawn from these models are only valid if the conditions powering the model remain relatively static.
But, these were the attribution models of the past. Advanced data platforms like Triple Whale enable marketers to have a unified view of marketing spend, conversion data across platforms, and multiple attribution models to uncover real-time insights into how ads are performing, to inform any strategy changes in the moment. Being able to modify the course of action based on current information is one of the biggest benefits of real-time attribution.
"Operating without reliable attribution is like navigating without a compass,” said Ethan Shust, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Triple Whale. “Brands that lean into accurate attribution can cut through the noise of conflicting data sources to identify which marketing efforts drive incremental revenue."
None of the marketers on your team wants to lose any fraction of their budget, no matter how small. But because marketing attribution is easily manipulated, you run the risk of different teams using different models that deliver the results they’re looking for. Many brands opt to leave attribution to one centralized team to limit the potential for this kind of data manipulation.
As convenient as it would be, no attribution model or tool can capture 100 percent of every customer’s data. That could be due to the fact that they use different devices or because they also engage with your brand on entirely IRL channels, like visiting stores and seeing billboards.
There are a couple of major ways you may miss the full picture of your customer journey. First, as mentioned above, marketing attribution can’t always account for offline touchpoints like billboards, stores, and phone calls.
But your model may also be set up improperly to fully capture your business funnel, creating holes in your data and skewing your insights. Make sure you’re using the best marketing attribution model for you. Triple Whale’s Total Impact model can show you how every single touchpoint contributes to your bottom lin.
Foster a culture of collaboration in your organization so different teams have access to information across various departments. Without this type of wide-reaching information sharing, you’ll have an even harder time capturing complete customer journeys.
Privacy concerns and regulatory pressures have been mounting, and attribution traditionally relied on cookies. But the shift towards privacy-centric policies has forced brands to consider tracking methods that maintain customer privacy, like Triple Whale’s Pixel.
Brands that continue to utilize cookie-based tracking or ad-platform specific tracking may have gaps in attribution due to these regulations, and the future of quality marketing attribution lies in the collection of first- or zero-party data that meets the current privacy regulations.
Marketing attribution focuses squarely on conversions and the campaigns that drive them. It’s a less effective measure of campaigns that create brand awareness and trust, rather than drive sales or signups. But these positive associations are still crucial to your overall success and shouldn’t be ignored just because they don’t fit as neatly into an attribution model.
Google Analytics is a popular attribution tool because it’s straightforward and free. But other marketing attribution tools can seriously eat into your budget and then ultimately disappoint you when they’re not intuitive to use. Check out the list of tools we like below for some inexpensive or free options, or consider investing in a comprehensive platform like Triple Whale’s that won’t let you down.
There are a number of different methods or models marketers can use for attribution. Attribution modeling assigns the credit for a conversion to a different touchpoint in the customer journey.
Here are a few of the most common marketing attribution models.
Single-touch attribution models, also called single-source attribution, attribute the conversion to one specific touchpoint in the sales funnel, either the first or the last.
Multi-touch attribution or multi-channel attribution models take into account the fact that it’s much more common that a customer will have multiple interactions with your brand before converting. MTA gathers a user’s entire history of views and clicks, then applies statistical models to determine which channels “caused” a conversion.
Where single-source models can dilute the importance of other channels, MTA does a much better job than last click of measuring the effect of demand generation channels. MTA assigns credit to all the different channels that were involved in the conversion. But there are still several different ways to approach multi-channel marketing attribution.
Instead of relying on individual customer data, marketing mix modeling collects historical data about when ad campaigns were running, how much budget was spent, and how many conversions took place. These numbers, along with seasonal and historical trends, are used to build a statistical model. Because of this historical approach, MMM can capture non-digital campaigns without special considerations.
Triple Whale’s MMM analyzes performance across channels to deliver actionable insights. Request a demo today.
The total-impact attribution model assigns credit to all the touchpoints along a customer's journey. This model takes into account all marketing channels and activities that may have influenced a customer's decision to convert, rather than just any specific interaction before a conversion.
The aim here is to deliver a more accurate and holistic view of marketing performance, allowing marketers to make more informed decisions about their marketing strategies and investments.
Once you understand the different marketing attribution models, how do you choose the best one to measure your performance?
Start by thinking about the steps in your typical sales funnel, how long and how many touchpoints a conversion generally takes, and how much of your creative runs offline. If your business operates mostly online and you just want a quick and simple result, last-touch attribution might be enough for you.
Then, consider the data sources available to you: If your company has already invested in a data collection tool, you’ll want to leverage that data as much as possible with multi-touch attribution. On the other hand, if you don’t have a data collection tool, then MTA might not be the best choice.
Weigh the importance of your brand’s long-term objectives, too. If you’re focusing on building a loyal customer base, then MTA might be most useful. But if you’re looking to optimize short-term performance and traffic, then you might want to consider MMM.
To make the most out of your attribution analysis, follow these strategies:
Marketing attribution tools take some of the pressure off of you and your team by automating and streamlining the tracking, analytics, and iterating required for successful attribution.
Here are some popular ones to consider:
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are both helping to address some of the traditional limitations of marketing attribution.
For example, AI technology can be used to predict the offline touchpoints that drive conversions by analyzing historical data and real-time signals, according to MarTech.
AI can be used to more thoroughly analyze all the touchpoints in a customer journey — especially cross-channel — creating a more accurate multi-touch attribution model.
These tools can also analyze large datasets at lightning speed, providing you with more actionable insights in record time that you can then implement to optimize your creative and improve your ROI.
Marketing attribution assigns credit for conversions to each touchpoint of the customer journey that drove it. It’s not an exact science, and there are many different models of marketing attribution. But used thoughtfully, this marketing metric can help you optimize your campaign spending and boost profit.
Because of the challenges and limitations of marketing attribution, it’s key to lean on tools and software that deliver a stress-free experience and accurate results. Triple Whale offers attribution models for every strategy, total-impact attribution, pre-built analytics dashboards, and advanced tracking technology with Pixel. Book a demo today!
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