Creating an accurate attribution model is one of the most difficult parts of any search marketer’s job, particularly in light of the proliferation of new media channels and audience fragmentation.

1. Understanding
Multi-Channel Attribution
Best Practices for Attribution
Strategy & Modeling
A Digital Marketing Depot Research Report

2. Understanding Multi-Channel Attribution
Understanding
Multi-Channel Attribution
Best Practices for Attribution
Strategy & Modeling
Introduction
M
any digital marketers manage their PPC campaigns as though clicks and conversions take place within a
silo, disconnected and unrelated to the customer engagement that occurs across multiple channels. PPC
campaigns are actually tightly interwoven with broader marketing programs that reach prospects and
customers over the entire customer lifecycle, whether on a website, through social media accessed on a mobile
device, in store or on the phone.
Viewing PPC campaigns within the broader context of lifetime customer relationships, and attributing this
information to bid rates and ROI calculations across channels, is crucial to your company’s bottom line. More
accurate attribution allows you to make more effective media buys, which ultimately lead to greater profits. It
can help you more effectively measure your performance against broad objectives, not just against individual
campaigns and keywords.
Yet, creating an accurate attribution model is one of the most difficult parts of any search marketer’s job,
particularly in light of the proliferation of new media channels and audience fragmentation. There are many
questions that are difficult to answer, including:
• What role did prior website referrals, searches and ads play in a conversion?
• Which metrics should be attributed and how?
• How much time passed between the consumer’s initial click and subsequent purchase?
• What tools are currently available to help us identify and weight these factors?
The answers come from a combination of PPC software tools that can implement advanced modeling techniques
and the people or partners that know how to make them work.
This EBook discusses why multi-channel attribution has become increasingly important to search marketers and
explores the advantages of using multi-channel attribution to improve the efficiency of PPC marketing programs,
as well as how to build an accurate multi-channel attribution model. Digital Marketing Depot and SearchForce
would like to thank the following SearchEngineLand columnists and industry experts for their valuable
contributions to this EBook: David Roth, senior director, search marketing, Yahoo!; Greg Sterling; George Michie,
CEO, Rimm-Kaufman Group; and Dax Hamman, Chief Revenue Officer, Chango.
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3. Understanding Multi-Channel Attribution
The Value of Multi-Channel Attribution According to
While paid search has become a key driver of online conversions, the proliferation digital research
of digital marketing channels has created complex interrelationships that can
only be understood with advanced technology. Consumers often browse across firm eMarketer,
different media channels before they decide to identify themselves as a prospect
or become a customer. Each channel plays a different role in how it influences the mobile ad spending
path that leads to a conversion. For example, many people may purchase on your
site after searching for your brand on Google or Bing. However, they may have
will grow to
been introduced to your brand via a blog or Facebook brand page, or while seeing
a product in the store or after viewing an offline ad in print or on TV.
nearly $1.23 billion
in 2012, while
Ad spending is increasing across digital marketing channels as marketers try
to identify and entice their prospects and customers across a widening array of social network ad
media choices – a task that has become increasingly difficult. According to digital
research firm eMarketer, mobile ad spending will grow to nearly $1.23 billion in spending will reach
2012, while social network ad spending will reach $8.0 billion.
$8.0 billion.
As a result, multi-touch or multi-channel attribution modeling has become a critical
tool for search marketers by offering the following bottom-line benefits:
• Better understanding of the relationship dynamics between diverse media channels and the objectives that are
best suited for each.
• More accurate analysis and measurement of PPC contribution to offline conversions.
• Less A/B testing costs, as attribution systems help defray the cost of ongoing testing.
• Improved management of paid search bids based on which keywords actually close and which assist the close.
• A holistic, multi-channel marketing approach that eliminates silos and maximizes ROI.
The Move Away from Last-Click Attribution
Search marketers continue to debate the merits of last-click vs. multi-touch or multi-channel attribution models.
While last-click models emphasize search that occurs deep into the purchase funnel, increasingly, PPC conversions
are influenced by a series of online clicks and offline searches that happen a few hours, days or weeks earlier.
Without tracking and analyzing multiple touch points, you can’t get the true ROI of your marketing dollars. As a
result, you might not be fully optimizing your marketing initiatives. According to Microsoft’s Atlas Institute, between
93-95% of audience engagements with digital advertising typically receive no credit at all when marketers review
campaign ROI. That means that most marketers are only looking at five percent to seven percent of consumer media
interactions when optimizing conversions.
According to a report published by Slingshot SEO in March 2012, the value and potential priority of various digital
marketing channels change when marketers use a multi-touch attribution model, and that many marketers are
placing too much emphasis on the last click as well as the first click in the stream of consumer interactions. As a
result, channels such as SEO, paid ads and referrals were being undervalued. On average, consumers took 2.79
interactions before converting, and the last click before the conversion was typically a direct visit to the site or a
branded keyword search.
A multi-touch attribution model allows you to track all user touch points and capture more complete information
about their interactions with your brands. The key is to track all of your digital media in one system, allowing you to
see all of the pathways users took to ultimately convert.
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4. Understanding Multi-Channel Attribution
For example, SearchForce features Pathtracker Pixel,™ a universal pixel that
accurately tracks cross-channel events or interactions in the proper sequence.
Some search
Consider a scenario where a consumer views a display ad on Monday, clicks a
sponsorship on Tuesday, receives an email from on Wednesday, and comes back
marketers believe
on Friday via a paid search ad and converted. Multi-touch attribution assigns that a last-click
credit to the entire conversion pathway, not just the last ad clicked.
model is the most
Multi-touch attribution models are difficult to develop and make effective
primarily because there are so many variables involved. How do you decide effective because the
what percentage of the conversion value to give to the first interaction vs. the
last when you need to consider the following factors:
search occurs closer
• Should ad impressions be weighted the same as clicks?
to the conversion.
• Are clicks from search worth the same as clicks from Facebook?
• How does recency effect attribution? Is a click that happened 12 days ago
still worth anything?
Some search marketers believe that a last-click model is the most effective because the search occurs closer to the
conversion. But last-click attribution models don’t follow consumers over extended time periods, or consider the
variety of online influencers such as email, direct navigation, display ads or even organic search (SEO).
As a result, a significant portion of the inaccuracies and oversimplifications involved in attributing digital media
channels for conversions comes from only counting the last click. If more than one keyword was clicked on the path
to a conversion, did those previous clicks “assist” in that conversion or lead the prospect into your sales funnel? If
so, they should be given some credit. Other keywords function well as “closers,” and convince prospects to take
action. Relying on the last click as a benchmark for success means you could be under-investing in other media that
actually improve results.
Creating an Effective Multi-Channel Attribution Model
Strategy Comes First
The successful use of multi-channel attribution first requires a well-planned strategy that includes management
buy-in, evaluation of staff resources and a robust PPC technology platform. Data can only be as smart as the people
interpreting it. Employing an attribution specialist to lead the effort is ideal, although not always doable. Your
marketing organization should conduct an exhaustive analysis of your business and online marketing programs.
Begin with your business goals and product adoption cycles, move on to conversion window analysis and end with
a channel-by-channel audit of both online and offline marketing.
It is important for statisticians to work hand-in-hand with marketers. Mathematicians without guidance from
marketing experience will build the wrong types of models. Marketers recognize the role that consumer behavior
plays in the correlations between different types of marketing interactions and conversion success.
While some attribution models may be mathematically sound, without buy-in from other departments beyond
the analytics group, they will not be used properly or at all. This is particularly true for large organizations where
marketing channels may be managed across a diverse set of departments and budgets. Many businesses split
management of channels across multiple teams and incentivize marketing managers on performance leading to
internal competition for the same conversions.
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5. Understanding Multi-Channel Attribution
Not All Marketing Touches Are Equal
Each marketing impression or touch in the conversion path has a Three Multi-Channel
unique value – and few, if any, are equal. A thirty-second TV spot, a
quality visit to your website, a walk through your brick-and-mortar Attribution Strategies
business are significantly more valuable impressions than exposure to
a print, display or text advertisement. 1. Multi-Channel Attribution Across
Digital Channels.
A paid or organic link on a SERP for a competitive non-brand search The effort to understand which
is much more likely to drive incremental business than traffic from digital marketing channels, i.e.,
someone searching for “YourTradeMark Coupons” and coming through social, display, video, referrals, email,
an affiliate. What creates value is learning what lift can be credited to search, contributed to a particular
each impression, not which ads consumers were exposed to. These conversion (or multiple conversions).
touches shouldn’t all be treated the same, and good attribution systems
need to understand and identify those distinctions. 2. Multi-Channel Attribution Across
Multiple Screens.
When solving for attribution, you need to determine the “influence With the massive adoption of mobile
potential” of each ad click, impression and site visit by considering the phones and tablets, consumers are
following factors: increasingly “four-screen” people
(TV, desktop, tablets, and smart
• Ad timing phones). That has directly translated
• Ad decay rate into a more complex fragmented
• Conversion influence landscape leading to the
• Products sold effort to understand how individuals
• Dollar amount spent experience your brand’s digital
• First-time vs. repeat buyer existence across multiple devices.
With this in mind, you can build a model the will predict consumer 3. Multi-Channel Attribution,
decisions as accurately as possible. While human behavior can be difficult Online to Store.
to measure, you can build and test an attribution model that factors in the The effort to understand the offline
‘how’ and ‘where’ someone encountered your product or ad. impact driven by online marketing
and advertising. For example,
Then, test the results of your attribution model. If the model -- which conversions (i.e., sales, leads or
attributes the predicted behavior to the previous action -- matches the catalog requests) driven to a retail
results, then your model works. If not, you’ll need to tweak it and test store or company call center by the
again. website, Facebook brand page or
Twitter account.
Weighting Attribution Factors Source: Occam’s Razor blog by
A consumer’s path to conversion is unique for every business. It is Avinash Kaushik
crucial to set attribution weights accordingly to clarify how various
marketing channels – including online and offline media – interact to
allow your optimization engine to leverage these insights to your advantage.
Even within each marketing channel, it is important to gather the following channel-specific data to identify the true
value of a click from that channel.
• Clicks
• Conversions
• Average Order Value (to normalize the effect of large orders that can skew data)
• Number of Channels per conversion
Clicks and average order value can come directly from analytics or the channel tool. Conversion counts come from
isolating the number of conversions attributed to the channel by dividing the number of conversions by the number
of unique channels associated with each conversion.
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6. Understanding Multi-Channel Attribution
To understand how different marketing channels influence conversions, begin by looking at standard metrics such
as CTR (clickthrough) and CPA (cost per account), as well as engagement metrics from incoming website traffic such
as time on site, pages visited and the time it takes to convert. It is also helpful to conduct incremental lift studies
to evaluate the percentage of interaction from each channel that is incremental or provides an “assist” to another
channel’s role in conversion.
Search technology can enable these capabilities. The SearchForce platform, for example, provides the following
three basic schemes for assigning credit to each click within a conversion path:
• Percentage attribution. With this option, marketers can specify a percentage that’s attributed to the first and/
or last click in the path to conversion. Any remaining credit is distributed to all clicks between the first and last.
This approach works best for campaigns that generally don’t exceed three to four clicks, because you will be
distributing some credit to mid-stream clicks without spreading them too thinly across too many clicks.
• Relative attribution. This method allows marketers to specify a relative decrease in credit based on a click’s
position in the path, i.e., the credit assigned to a specific click is less for clicks near the beginning of the path. If
you set this percentage to zero, credit will be attributed equally among all clicks. This option is appropriate for
strategies that value the benefit of the last click more highly than others, but still want to assign some credit to
earlier clicks.
• Custom attribution. This approach provides the flexibility to set specific percentages for each individual click
in the path. This option is a good choice for campaigns in which each click makes a unique contribution to
a conversion, and you want to make sure that these clicks each receive a specific credit instead of simply
redistributing the remaining credit from other clicks.
7 Metrics to Link Digital Clicks to In-Store Sales
Research shows that a growing number of consumers use multiple channels to make purchase decisions. According
to The Multi-Channel Retail Report, co-sponsored by J.C. Williams Group, bizrate.com and shop.org, 26% of
consumers that visit a store looking for a product subsequently buy that item from a catalog; another 25% of
consumers that visit a store subsequently purchase the product online. In addition, more than two-thirds of catalog
shoppers ultimately purchase a product online, while 39% of website browsers purchase a product from a print
catalog.
Here are seven metrics to help you accurately track the relationship between online and offline channels.
1. Online/offline orders and pick-ups. Track customers who searched and purchased online, then picked up their
purchases in your brick-and-mortar stores.
2. Store locator pages. Provide relevant information like “find a store near you,” store hours, directions and phone
numbers in all of your digital campaigns.
3. Time spent on website. The more time someone spends on your website, the more likely they’re interested
in your product or service. Don’t get “too good” at driving online searchers to physical stores; improve your
conversion marketing so the customer is spending more than just his or her time online.
4. Queries with geographic qualifiers. Some queries containing geographic qualifiers indicate offline purchase
intent. For example, if someone is searching for a “dentist in West Vancouver” they’re more than likely looking
for a dental appointment in a particular geographic location.
5. Local search. Some Yellow Pages advertisers use dedicated phone numbers for their campaigns. Try doing the
same on the search side. If not, you’re not adequately tracking the campaign’s impact.
6. Promo codes. Create coupons or other online-specific promotion that’s only redeemable in the store (if
appropriate). Customers can write down or print special codes that they can redeem in-store.
7. Post-purchase surveys. After consumers make online purchases, ask for their feedback through a post-purchase
survey to get more information on buying behavior and offline impact.
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7. Understanding Multi-Channel Attribution
Conclusion
The growing interrelationship between marketing channels is creating new and exciting challenges for search
marketers. Every brand wants to find the most effective, profitable marketing mix for its products and services
across all channels. The struggle is to monetize paid search, in terms of accurately measuring its impact on sales
and customer engagement. While this is not a difficult concept to grasp, it is difficult to break down the problem into
actionable tactics that can be readily applied to your PPC programs.
Designing an appropriate attribution model can be complex, but with the right conversion tracking technology,
and by following a set of best practices, you can use conversion data to your advantage to boost performance and
understand your sales channels with more precision and clarity. While there is no standard set of models that will
make sense for every marketer, you can develop a consistent attribution framework that can be applied to each
business problem that will positively affect campaign results.
Remember, multi-channel attribution is no longer a luxury. It is an essential tool for drilling down into conversion
paths to help you optimize performance and determine which strategies work best to create more profit and
revenue. n
About SearchForce
Since 2004, SearchForce has been a pioneer in delivering high performance search marketing tools. The company
offers advertisers and agencies one online platform to effectively manage large-scale paid marketing campaigns
across all search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Facebook and more.
In addition to bid optimization and campaign management, SearchForce offers cross channel attribution for a more
accurate view on paths to conversion, plus a localized platform that supports multiple languages, time zones and
currencies. Learn more at http://www.searchforce.com
Headquarters:
3 Waters Park Drive
Suite 211
San Mateo, CA 94403
Telephone: (650) 235-8800
Fax: (650) 312-8661
NY Office:
27 West 24th Street
Suite 704
New York, NY 10010
Telephone: (212) 255-8399
Fax: (212) 255-8395
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