The Limits And Uses Of Marketing Attribution Models

The winners at the Academy Awards have it easy. When they reach the podium, air-kiss the host and take their statues, they have a tried and tested formula for giving credit to everyone who helped to put them there. They know to thank their agent and their spouse and their parents and their manager and their director and everyone else they’ve ever met, and they cram those thanks into the first few seconds of their speeches with little differentiation between them.

Marketing has it harder. It’s not enough for us to say that the different content that appeared in a newsletter, a video, a billboard and a booklet all contributed to the success of the conversion. We need to know how much each point of contact contributed so that we can understand how to manage our campaigns.

A number of different models allow us to do that.

The single-click attribution model is the simplest. It gives all the credit to one particular action. Usually that’s the last click or, in an analogue setting, the last interaction. It has the advantage of clarity; you don’t have to look further than the coupon or the handshake before the sale. The disadvantage is that it’s inaccurate. Remove all the interactions that came before that last contact and conversions fall. Something had happened before that last contact, and that something needs to be understood and credited.

Variants on this model include the first point of contact and the last AdWords click in online advertising. They’re all easy to implement but fail to credit all the aspects of a campaign accurately.

The Position Based Attribution Model introduces a little more flexibility to the attribution system. It usually gives 40 percent of the credit to both the first and the last contacts, and allocates the remaining 20 percent of the credit between the various points of contact in between.

In sharing the credit, it offers more accuracy than a single-click attribution model but it has a couple of weaknesses. First, the credits may not correspond to the value of the contribution, and while you can change those values, you still have to decide how much credit to allocate to each contact. Secondly, customer journeys aren’t always linear. Different customers may have different initial contact points and even different final contacts.  

The Time Decay Attribution Model attempts to bring a little more sophistication to attribution. The rationale behind it feels more intuitive. The idea is that the influence a point of contact has over a conversion diminishes with time. Each piece of content comes with a half-life whose energy dissipates if it’s not refreshed with another, newer contact. It’s the rationale that drives companies to continue advertising and launching new campaigns regardless of the effectiveness of a previous campaign.

Unlike Hollywood Oscar winners no attribution model—and there are many others—puts in a perfect performance. All have their weaknesses and their strengths. But we need them, we need to understand them and we need to make sure that every aspect of a campaign gets the credit it deserves.

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