As a local business it is often confusing to understand which marketing channels, campaigns, and touchpoints are most effective in driving conversions, sales, and contributing to the growth of your business. How should you allocate your marketing budget to be effective? Using a marketing attribution program helps you to measure the actual impact of your marketing efforts and identify those areas that need improvement.
Marketing attribution is the process of assigning credit for revenue or conversions to specific marketing touchpoints or channels. This marketing attribution process can help local businesses understand which campaigns and which channels are most effective and help to optimize their marketing investments.
There are many attributions models out there, each with its own approach to assigning credit including single-touch and multi-touch. Single touch models, like first-click and last-click, assign credit to a single touchpoint, while multi-touch models, such as linear, time decay, and position-based attribution, distribute credit across multiple interactions. In future blog posts we’ll review each of these models in detail.
The most popular marketing attribution model is the last-click model. This model assigns 100% of the conversion credit to the last marketing interaction a customer had before making a purchase.
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There are certainly advantages to last-click attribution including its simplicity and ease of implementation. Last-click helps identify that final touchpoint that directly leads to a conversion, enabling local business to focus on optimizing those specific channels and campaigns. This focus is believed to lead to a clearer understanding of the bottom-of-funnel performance.
But sometimes the easy way isn’t necessarily the best way.
Last-click attribution is considered a good starting point for marketers who are new to attribution modeling, offering a simple and easy-to-understand method.
While simple, last-click attribution has several drawbacks for the more experienced marketer. It primarily overemphasizes the last touchpoint in a customer’s journey, potentially neglecting the influence of earlier interactions and misallocating marketing budgets. This can lead to an incomplete understanding of the customer journey and underinvestment in channels crucial for awareness and nurturing. As well, because last-click attribution focuses on immediate conversions, and doesn’t capture the long-term impact of marketing efforts on brand loyalty or customer lifetime value.
A relatively straight forward example of the limitations of last-click attribution modeling might be a customer who clicks on a display ad because of their interest in the product being advertised. From there they might go to Amazon to check on availability and pricing comparisons. Then they might visit You Tube for a demo or assembly video. Further they might visit a third-party site to check customer reviews. Another step on this customer’s path-to-purchase might include searching social media for posts highlighting the product and customers’ opinions about it. Finally, they might go to Google to find the company’s website where they go to make the purchase.
In this simple example, the customer’s journey was typical in that they interacted with several media channels toward informing their purchase decision. Each of those media and platforms did their job and progressed the sale. While all contributing, the last-click attribution model would assign 100% of the credit for the sale to Google as the last place the customer went prior to purchase.
If the local business proceeded to utilize this information from the attribution model to inform how they might optimize their campaign, they would be focusing on only a single step in an integrated media path-to-purchase. Ignoring or underrepresenting the importance of top and mid-funnel marketing tactics to their detriment.
Here at Sentinel Solutions, we believe in a marketing approach that understands the customer journey and builds an integrated multimedia program that interacts with customers throughout their path-to-purchase. This approach combines different media to create a more engaging, informative, and effective communications strategy that nurtures and advances the sale at every touchpoint. To apply a last click-attribution model to these campaigns would do a disservice to the contributing media and our client.
Last-click attribution models should be avoided by advanced marketers because they oversimplify the customer journey, ignore the contributions of earlier, top and mid-funnel touchpoints that are crucial for lead generation, nurturing, social proof, and brand awareness, among others.
Overreliance on this model can lead to a misallocation of marketing budgets, missed optimization opportunities, and a skewed understanding of which marketing efforts and channels are most effective.
There isn’t a single marketing attribution model that is considered ‘best’ as the most effective choice for you depends on your specific business goals, budget, and the complexity of your customer’s journey. That said, multi-touch attribution models including linear (equal credit to all touchpoints), time-decay (more credit to recent touchpoints), U-shaped (most credit to the first and last touchpoints), and others are generally considered more accurate and comprehensive than single-touch models including last-click.
To learn more about how to use single and multi-touch attribution systems, give us a call or drop us an email here at Sentinel Solutions.
We have expertise in multimedia marketing and can help you build a compelling campaign that engages your audience, drives sales, and grows your business…And include the measurement systems that prove its effectiveness and inform its improvement.
Give us a call at 603-352-5896 or email Advertising@SentinelDigitalSolutions.com.
We’re here to help you succeed.
Additional Resources:
- What is Marketing Attribution?
- Understanding The Customer Journey Toward Business Success
- Can Marketing Analytics Help Your Local Business Succeed?
