Credit Where Credit is Due: A Look at Marketing Attribution
The gigantic ecosystem of marketing touchpoints continues to become more complicated.
Considering the expansion of traditional media channels into areas such as connected TV (CTV), over-the-top (OTT) and streaming audio, as well as the complexities of digital media—which is a world of its own, spanning programmatic, search, social, email, SMS, and many others—it’s not always clear how all these marketing channels are contributing to your brand awareness, website traffic, conversions and ultimately sales.
Enter marketing attribution.
What is attribution?
Attribution is the process of applying credit for a conversion or purchase to the various touchpoints along a customer’s path. This can include a few (or even a few dozen) touchpoints depending on the purchase, the individual consumer, the types of touchpoints being utilized and many other variables.
Attribution is crucial in a digital, multi-channel world because it goes beyond individual platform metrics to create a comprehensive picture of how your touchpoints are performing together, allowing marketers more opportunities to find insights and make stronger strategic decisions.
How does attribution work?
Once a conversion happens, attribution tools allow us to see all the actions that occurred leading up to it. Credit is then applied to the appropriate touchpoints along the path, showing their value to the conversion.
The credit distribution can be done in various ways: All credit to the last touchpoint, all credit to the first touchpoint, equal credit to all touchpoints, equal credit to the first and last touchpoint and less to the in-between points, and countless other combinations. Deciphering the most appropriate attribution method is where human input is critical, despite the otherwise significant level of automation involved in the attribution tracking and optimization process elsewhere.
It all depends on your goals, audience, product, conversion points, purchase cycle and a host of other factors. Once the method is chosen and credit is distributed, advertisers will begin to see patterns in their marketing results and can analyze and act on these patterns to optimize their plans and achieve the best results for their campaigns.
Ultimately, attribution helps answer the ultimate marketing question: what’s actually working?
Think of your purchase process; do you buy something the first time it’s presented to you? Do you research the product, brand, or competitors first? Wait to buy until you see a discount?
It probably changes depending on the product, cost or even our mood, but the paths to purchase are exactly what advertisers want to understand in order to (try to) repeat it. Our digital world/landscape made that more attainable and attribution reporting adds context to the digital results marketers regularly analyze.
Why should marketers use attribution?
Let’s say a popular shoe brand has attribution modeling in place for their new winter campaign and their marketing mix includes email, social media, website, organic blog, and re-targeting efforts. Individual platform metrics could show that email and re-targeting efforts performed ‘best’ for conversions, but attribution adds context to those conversions by outlining the touchpoints made on social media, website, and organic blog efforts before the conversion. Attribution could show that consumers first saw the shoe brands’ ad on social media before visiting the website 2.5 times (subscribing to email) and then converting via email – a successful consumer journey that demonstrates the importance of social media, website, and email in marketing efforts.
The customer path is unique to each brand’s conversion metrics, but generally, advertisers want to know which interactions in these paths are most likely to garner results. By narrowing down which media or which creative messaging led their customers to convert, brands can optimize their marketing plans to those elements of the plan and ideally shorten their customers’ conversion paths. This also leads to a better user experience and a more efficient investment of time, effort and advertising dollars.
Brands that look at their media plans with attribution data in mind will begin to uncover deeper insights such as common paths customers take, consistent trends in first or last touchpoints, average length of times it takes from the first touchpoint to the conversion and much more.
Does it actually work?
We’ve put attribution into action for several of our clients and have seen tremendous results.
For a local healthcare industry client, we had been running a continuous local TV + radio campaign to reach consumers and build awareness for the hospital and its key service lines, but we wanted to more directly measure and understand the impact of our TV advertising.
The TV campaign portion was part of a larger, integrated campaign that included both digital and traditional media. While we could directly measure digital, we needed to prove that the traditional media was working as well. Using offline-to-digital attribution tracking technology, we were able to determine the quantity and quality of website traffic driven by our TV and radio ads. We measured website visits that occurred within minutes of each airing, looking at metrics such as creative, daypart, day of week, network, and program. The data helped us determine which aspects of the campaign were leading to site traffic and conversions and therefore guided our media planning and optimization decisions.
We found that specific TV programs drove better performance than others. Certain dayparts such as early morning, early fringe and daytime were more likely to drive traffic to the website, among other results. These are insights that directly impacted the way we scheduled our media and placed our buys moving forward. Without using this type of attribution tracking, we would not have been able to uncover these insights and improvements. On top of it, the client gets a much fuller understanding of the performance of their media program.
The results spoke for themselves:
38% above average website session duration
30% improvement in bounce rate
More than 50% of website conversions attributed to broadcast media channels
More than 1.3 million visits garnered from 47,000 spot airings (which equates to 29 website visits per spot airing)
Even when a campaign is contained within the digital space, attribution will dive deep into the relationships among media channels and how they guide consumers down the path to conversion.
For example, attribution can uncover insights into the value of retargeting toward the beginning of the purchase path by assigning how OTT/CTV streaming media generates interest and leads consumers to other channels that drive them toward conversion. By distributing proper credit to each channel, attribution provides a far superior understanding of how a marketing mix works across channels.
And it doesn’t stop there. Marketing attribution can apply to offline media channels, too. This gets a little trickier and is worthy of an entirely new discussion. Stay in touch with us to learn more.
For more information, contact Mike Pocci at 330-472-9774 or mpocci@teamaftermath.com.