Your Guide to Multichannel Attribution

Customers make decisions based on many different inputs. Commercials, digital marketing, out-of-home ads, email engagement - each one contributes to their choice of brands and services. This creates an inherent challenge in understanding modern customer journeys and which of your marketing efforts has the greatest effect when it comes to conversions.

In this guide, we’ll explore why single-channel attribution is no longer enough and how to gain deeper insight from multichannel attribution methods.

Understanding Attribution Models

Attribution models help you understand what really inspires customer decisions. Each model approaches attribution differently. Single attribution models include first-touch and last-touch models. Multi-channel attribution includes linear, time-decay, and U-shaped and W-shaped models.

First-touch gives the most credit to the user's first point of contact, while last-touch focuses on the final touchpoint. 

Linear attribution gives credit to all touchpoints equally. With the time decay model, the greatest attribution goes to the most recent contact, and less with each contact further back. U-shaped and W-shaped attribution models focus on key points in the buyer journey.

Ideally, your model will result in data-driven attribution in which credit can be applied based on data regarding the buyer journey.

Choosing the Right Model for Your Business

Which multichannel attribution model should you apply to gain the most accurate and powerful insights?  You can use different factors to help you explore attribution models and determine the most important touch points in your customer journey.

Factors to consider include your target audience, sales cycle, data collection, and tech stack structure.

Businesses and consumers make decisions differently based on different influences, so your model should align with your audience, whether you’re targeting B2B or B2C.  You should also consider how long it typically takes a customer to go from awareness to purchase

Explore where and how you can collect data to determine which touchpoints matter most. Then determine how your tech stack influences your buyer journey and how you can interpret it.

These details will influence the right choice of multichannel attribution model and the data you have to work with.

Common Attribution Pitfalls

Multichannel attribution is challenging by nature. Determining the touchpoints that make the biggest impact, including non-digital influences that are harder to measure. This can lead to a few pitfalls that you can avoid through awareness.

Tracking buyer data can be difficult across devices. Explore ways to maintain buyer identity files. Use surveys and other zero-party data to determine the influence of offline touchpoints.

Don't forget word-of-mouth attribution that occurs offline or "dark social." You should also keep cookie limitations in mind - technology limits how much a cookie can track for data accuracy. Lastly, remember to respect and protect customer privacy when tracking customer journeys.

Setting Up Proper Tracking

Cross-platform attribution relies on data tracking. Use a combination of Google Analytics and cookies to follow your customers on their digital journey. Track individual customers and leads with CRM integration and use custom parameter tracking for more refined data.

Apply quality assurance steps to help you determine the accuracy of your attribution data collection.

Making Attribution Data Actionable

The final step after collecting multichannel attribution data is to put it to work. By tracking how your customers were inspired toward conversion, you can have a greater impact on outreach and marketing in the future.

Determine your key metrics and build attribution reports that will help you refine both your data and results. Use cross-team data sharing, such as between marketing and sales, for greater insights. This will help you determine how to allocate your budget and optimize each campaign across the many channels that influence modern consumers.

Empower Your Marketing with Multichannel Attribution

Ready to bring multichannel attribution into your marketing approach? If you’re not sure where to begin, don’t worry - we’re here to help.  Connect with us today to learn how we can help you navigate multichannel attribution and more.