Why One-Touch Attribution Isn't Enough

I recently partnered with a Canadian-owned sustainable clothing brand to build and expand their marketing strategy. When we first started working with their team they told us where leads and conversions were coming from; I’ll admit – I was skeptical. We ended up leveraging Triple Whale to help us understand the customer journey and where we should actually be attributing success to. Our learnings were eye-opening, to say the least.

What is an Attribution Model?

Before we dive in, let’s talk about attribution modeling, according to Google:

“An attribution model is the rule, or set of rules, that determines how credit for sales and conversions is assigned to touchpoints in conversion paths. For example, the Last Interaction model in Analytics assigns 100% credit to the final touchpoints (i.e., clicks) that immediately precede sales or conversions. In contrast, the First Interaction model assigns 100% credit to touchpoints that initiate conversion paths.”

Understanding The Funnel

So back to what we learned. The usual conversion funnel has multiple steps. It takes awareness of a problem, interest in finding the solution, a comparison of solutions, and a final conversion action before you see any real profit. More specifically, that funnel often involves finding content via social media, reading the content multiple times, getting hit with remarketing, coming back to fill out a lead magnet, attending a webinar, and then converting on a final product.

People often take weeks to convert, during which they’ll land on your content possibly dozens of times. So when we really took a deep dive into the data with our client, we quickly realized that they were only seeing a small piece of a very large, complex process.

The Problem with Last Touch Attribution

The problem with last touch attribution is it overlooks the full customer path that actually leads to the conversion (see funnel, above). This can lead to an imbalance in marketing efforts - for example, this brand focusing way too much on email and not on social campaigns or diversifying their strategy with search ads, for example. Before working with us they were assigning ‘success’ to email, because that is where people were clicking through to learn more about the brand and visit the website. The actual conversion was coming days or weeks later, when they were retargeted with social ads.

I’ll give an informal (and totally not sponsored) shout out to Triple Whale because their platform gives credit to every step in the journey, allowing marketers to see how every touch point impacts the conversion. This holistic view also allows marketers to see where their ad spend is going and how they can better reallocate it.

So where do we go from here?

Well, attribution modeling isn’t perfect. For some businesses, last-touch is all that matters to them. The B2C brands we work with at Kindle & Slate need to understand their full customer journey as how different touch points affect purchase decisions and nurture the customer throughout that journey. 

An important challenge with digital marketing is being able to attribute your conversions to a specific marketing touch-point. It's how advertisers scale their brand, and how they understand the ROI of the paid ads investment. After all, we need to be able to invest in the platforms that have the most influence, right? My recommendation if you are getting started is to map out the entire journey and then assign the heaviest weight to the stages where you’re spending the most energy and advertising dollars. Your priority starting out should be to ensure your ad spend is being allocated appropriately to your customer’s journey and the purchase funnel. Ultimately, it's the advertiser's job to be able to decide which piece of their marketing strategy makes the most sense for their brand, and which model tells the right story.