Marketo-DG2DA

PART IX: MEASUREMENT
ATTRIBUTION
Often marketers feel that it’s hard to demonstrate the impact that their marketing program has
on revenue—particularly with digital ads. With the right combination of metrics and an
attribution model that makes sense for your business and stakeholders, you will easily be able
to share insights into your various digital advertising programs’ levels of effectiveness.
Attribution models offer marketers a
set of guidelines that help determine
which activities get credit for sales
and conversions. Different models
will impact the valuation of your
marketing activities and channels.
Google offers marketers a
convenient Model Comparison Tool
that allows you to input an example
and view the various results,
illustrating the impact that different
models have on attribution. Let’s
explore the various methods of
program attribution with this
example from Google:
A customer finds your site by
clicking one of your Facebook
display ads. He returns a few days
later by clicking over from Google
Display Ad. Later, he arrives via an
email from a campaign you sent.
And then later that same day he
comes back and makes a purchase
from your website.
Now let’s take a look at how we
can think about measuring
these touches:
First Touch Attribution:
In this model the first
touch-point—in this case
the Facebook display ad—would
receive 100% of the credit for the
sale. This model works best if your
top goal for running ads is to create
initial awareness.
Last Touch Attribution:
In this model the last touchpoint—in
this case the direct
channel (your website)—would
receive 100% of the credit for the
sale. This model works best if your
ads are designed to attract people at
the moment of action (often
purchase), or if your business has a
mostly transactional sales cycle.
Multi Touch Attribution:
In this model every touchpoint
in the conversion
path—in this case, Facebook, Google,
email marketing, and your website—
share equal credit for the sale (25%
each.) This model works best if your
ad campaigns are designed to
maintain interest, awareness, and
contact throughout the sales cycle.
Time Decay
Attribution: In this
model the touch-points
that are closest in time (most
recent) to the sale get more of the
credit. For this example, the direct
and email channels would get the
most credit because the
customer interacted with them
within hours of purchase, and
Facebook and Google would
receive less credit, since the
interaction occurred almost a
week prior. This model works
best if your sales cycle has a very
short consideration phase, or if
you are running short promotion
type campaigns.
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