Quique Arranz

Quique Arranz

Strategy Manager

Today’s consumer is bombarded with advertising messages from both traditional and digital media channels. User journeys have become more complex, there are more touchpoints in the space between the user browsing to the user completing the purchase. 

Omnichannel strategies have made it more difficult for marketing managers to track entire purchase journeys.  Multi touch-points can cause a loss of data, leaving marketers unable to identify that a user simply interacting is indeed the same user who completed the purchase. Without tracking user activity, companies cannot evaluate the impact the different channels and campaigns have on users’ purchase decisions and therefore, cannot see where the actual value is generated.  

The main two challenges faced when building an attribution model are implementing a unique user identifier across the different platforms and integrating all data coming from digital platforms and the CRM, where the offline conversions are.

Companies that obtain conversions through call centres or shop stores need to track their offline conversions. Solely tracking online conversions deters marketers from mapping out users’ full journey, inhibiting the optimisation of their marketing strategy and straining their ROI. Custom attribution models will combine your data, give you the proper insights, and attribute the proper credits to different campaigns and channels.

The attribution model is not the same for all companies and depends on your marketing activity and business objectives. For companies using mainly Search activity, a last-click attribution model would be recommended, for a company using Search, social and display activity, a more complex attribution model would be required to integrate all the impressions and the attribution sourced from each platform.

Attribution models are powerful tools that assist marketers in making data-driven decisions, provide additional investment opportunities and contribute to a KPI-based form of optimizing their marketing budget.