What is Attribution Modelling?
Attribution modelling is the process of understanding the purchase journey of your customers, analysing data to ensure you are investing in the right areas to drive profit. It will identify why people purchase from you, which marketing campaigns or content they have had touch points with before purchasing or completing a Goal in Google Analytics and ensures you understand how your marketing channels such as SEO, PPC, Social Media and Email work together to push people through the buying process.
A lot of marketers still look at marketing channels in separation, separating out PPC, SEO, Email etc and not looking into how they work together to drive revenue. This will be affecting how you value different channels and how you invest. For example, you probably have PPC campaigns that drive people to your website, but if they convert via another channel you could be undervaluing the campaign and not investing enough into them or worse turning them off thinking they are not working.
Think of a purchase or Goal completion as a goal in Football, when a striker scores a goal is he solely responsible? Or are other players involved that played equally as an important role, who started the opportunity? Who assisted during the attack and who scored the goal are all important and this is the same in Attribution modelling!
How to find out if you could have an Attribution issue?
The first thing you can check is the multi-channel Funnel overview report in Google analytics. On the left-hand menu click on Conversions > Multi Channel Funnels > Overview. Select a date range to cover the last 6 months and have a look at the … graph. If the bubbles are overlapping there is a good chance you require attribution modelling to understand what is happening. If you get a message from Google Analytics saying, “This report requires goals and/or e-commerce tracking to be enabled for the view.” Then you will need to set up Goals before being able to analyse performance. We will cover the importance of this later.
The Image above shows how the different channels are working together to convert site visitors:
As you can see there is a lot of crossover in how the channels are working together, PPC (Blue) is over lapping both email and Organic to a point where we expect to see attribution issues that will be affecting the account. This will need to be identified to ensure we are reporting perp> <!formance accurately and not undervaluing any PPC campaigns/keywords where we could be investing more.
