{"id":16944,"date":"2022-11-23T09:19:32","date_gmt":"2022-11-23T09:19:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.searchenginejournal.com\/practical-guide-multi-touch-attribution\/471022\/"},"modified":"2022-11-23T09:19:32","modified_gmt":"2022-11-23T09:19:32","slug":"a-practical-guide-to-multi-touch-attribution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marketingnewsbox.com\/?p=16944","title":{"rendered":"A Practical Guide To Multi-Touch Attribution"},"content":{"rendered":"

The customer journey involves multiple interactions between the customer and the merchant or service provider.<\/p>\n

We call each interaction in the customer journey a touch point.<\/p>\n

According to Salesforce.com, it takes, on average, six to eight touches <\/a>to generate a lead in the B2B space.<\/p>\n

The number of touchpoints is even higher for a customer purchase.<\/p>\n

Multi-touch attribution is the mechanism to evaluate each touch point\u2019s contribution toward conversion and gives the appropriate credits to every touch point involved in the customer journey.<\/p>\n

Conducting a multi-touch attribution analysis can help marketers understand the customer journey<\/a> and identify opportunities to further optimize the conversion paths.<\/p>\n

In this article, you will learn the basics of multi-touch attribution, and the steps of conducting multi-touch attribution analysis with easily accessible tools.<\/p>\n

What To Consider Before Conducting Multi-Touch Attribution Analysis<\/h2>\n

Define The Business Objective<\/h3>\n

What do you want to achieve from the multi-touch attribution analysis?<\/p>\n

Do you want to evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of a particular marketing channel, understand your customer\u2019s journey, or identify critical pages on your website for A\/B testing?<\/p>\n

Different business objectives may require different attribution analysis approaches.<\/p>\n

Defining what you want to achieve from the beginning helps you get the results faster.<\/p>\n

Define Conversion<\/h3>\n

Conversion is the desired action you want your customers to take.<\/p>\n

For ecommerce sites, it\u2019s usually making a purchase, defined by the order completion event.<\/p>\n

For other industries, it may be an account sign-up or a subscription.<\/p>\n

Different types of conversion likely have different conversion paths.<\/p>\n

If you want to perform multi-touch attribution on multiple desired actions, I would recommend separating them into different analyses to avoid confusion.<\/p>\n

Define Touch Point<\/h3>\n

Touch point could be any interaction between your brand and your customers.<\/p>\n

If this is your first time running a multi-touch attribution analysis, I would recommend defining it as a visit to your website from a particular marketing channel. Channel-based attribution is easy to conduct, and it could give you an overview of the customer journey.<\/p>\n

If you want to understand how your customers interact with your website, I would recommend defining touchpoints based on pageviews on your website.<\/p>\n

If you want to include interactions outside of the website, such as mobile app installation, email open, or social engagement, you can incorporate those events in your touch point definition, as long as you have the data.<\/p>\n

Regardless of your touch point definition, the attribution mechanism is the same. The more granular the touch points are defined, the more detailed the attribution analysis is.<\/p>\n

In this guide, we\u2019ll focus on channel-based and pageview-based attribution.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll learn about how to use Google Analytics and another open-source tool to conduct those attribution analyses.<\/p>\n

An Introduction To Multi-Touch Attribution Models<\/h2>\n

The ways of crediting touch points for their contributions to conversion are called attribution models.<\/p>\n

The simplest attribution model is to give all the credit to either the first touch point, for bringing in the customer initially, or the last touch point, for driving the conversion.<\/p>\n

These two models are called the first-touch attribution model and the last-touch attribution model, respectively.<\/p>\n

Obviously, neither the first-touch nor the last-touch attribution model is \u201cfair\u201d to the rest of the touch points.<\/p>\n

Then, how about allocating credit evenly across all touch points involved in converting a customer? That sounds reasonable \u2013 and this is exactly how the linear attribution model works.<\/p>\n

However, allocating credit evenly across all touch points assumes the touch points are equally important, which doesn\u2019t seem \u201cfair\u201d, either.<\/p>\n

Some argue the touch points near the end of the conversion paths are more important, while others are in favor of the opposite. As a result, we have the position-based attribution model that allows marketers to give different weights to touchpoints based on their locations in the conversion paths.<\/p>\n

All the models mentioned above are under the category of heuristic, or rule-based, attribution models.<\/p>\n

In addition to heuristic models, we have another model category called data-driven attribution, which is now the default model used in Google Analytics.<\/p>\n

What Is Data-Driven Attribution?<\/h2>\n

How is data-driven attribution<\/a> different from the heuristic attribution models?<\/p>\n

Here are some highlights of the differences:<\/p>\n