CXL Institute Digital Analytics Minidegree Review #11

I’ve learned a lot of things and some things I’ve known when it comes to marketing. One thing that is brand new to me and never understood is Marketing Attribution. I’ve heard of it before but I never really knew what it was until taking Russell Mcathy’s course on attribution. He’s the ceo and co-founder of Ringside Data. This guy knows a lot of things regarding marketing and attribution models. There are several types of attributions. He goes over all of them. There’s B2B and B2C attirbution models.

He says that a lot of marketing teams wrongly contribute things that contribute to the sale. Attribution is about understanding the consumer not just only a metric. Russell explains the concept of conversion and why it is important in the overall theory. He aligns the theory of attribution to business goals through ROI and finally look at the difference in approach to attribution in B2B and B2C businesses. One of the struggles when in comes to B2B attribution is that it could be multiple different individuals in an organization or in a household for B2C.

Good thing is that Google allows for attribution tracking.Russell discusses collecting attribution is becoming hard with new privacy laws like GDPR and such. New industry trends and regulations have impacted data required for attribution.

Although difficult, attribution tracking is possible but more advanced. Russell shows there’s not only problems with online attribution tracking but online. he explains how attribution should tie with the online and offline world together. Russell explains that calculating your attribution should from all types of advertising should have the same logic. Teams should strive for the same alignment of logic and calculations. It’s a psychological shift of how it impacts consumers. Attribution is not just another metric/number on a report and it’s not analytics. Russell says attribution shouldn’t be a part of your marketing, it should be the way you do marketing. The beginning, middle and end. He gives some examples of how attribution can be used and how it can change a business strategically using output from attribution.

“Do I need attribution” is one of the first questions that pop ups. Attribution gives insights to consumer journey and good for when doing conversion optimization. Each company utilizes attribution differently. The way it’s set up and tracked. He goes over the pros and cons of the different attribution models.

The typical attribution model he goes over has atleast four different touch points. These interactions are focused on visits. So the last touch point is the visit where the conversion happens.

So there’s the Last non-direct click model. The third time the user might’ve came through PPC and the final sale comes through direct web visit. The credit would go to the third touch point.

There’s the Last interaction attribution. The last interaction gets the credit for the sale. The last interaction is what is counted for the conversion. The thing about this model is that it’s not very good at understanding the consumer behavior through the whole journey. It’s focus on activities that are driving the conversion.

Linear Attribution is where you distribute the value through every interaction equally. This treats all channels and interactions as equal. The flaw of this model is that it doesn’t actually show the marketer what campaigns, what channels actually impacted that user. Russell doesn’t recommend using this model.

Time Decay Model- is basically saying when the conversion happens. redistribute the value of that conversion back through previous historic visits. We look at the actions over time. The sale and conversion has to most value. After each interaction, the value goes up.

Position based attribution- Is where the first and last interactions are given the most credit. in a lot of cases, this can be called the bathtub model because the first interaction gets 40% of the value and the last gets 40% and then 20% is equally distributed between the other two interactions.

The first thing wee need to create an attributions solution is web analytics data. Tools like Google analytics, Adobe analytics, etc. helps provide this. You have to ask yourself important questions in what you are trying to track, do and achieve. This is something that is making me think about what I should do with my company. Russell explains about micro and macro conversion. Macro would be store sales, lead generation. Micro would be category page view, product view, add to basket, blot post view, etc. Russell shows a diagram of how complicated a user journey could look like.

You can track PPC and other advertising campaigns but tracking SEO is the most complicated in difficult because it’s organic. There're no costs associated with SEO besides the content production. It’s hard to 100% track attribution properly with SEO but it’s the most cost effective solution. Conversion Rate Optimization can have an effect on touch points in attribution models. Instead of converting on the fourth step, users may convert in the third of second. We can optimize and increase conversion with optimal CRO tactics.

Russell talks and explains some attribution tracking tactics for CRO, PPC, SEO, Display, Affiliates, Email, TV and Direct mail marketing. A lot to this stuff is new to me and opened my eyes to tracking all these marketing channels. PPC can affect the full consumer journey and not just the last interaction. SEO of then plays a second fiddle to the more easily attributable channels.

Display is an interesting one. It’s something that’s hard to track. It’s typically is forced to use a different form of attribution than other marketing channels. it’s not a click, it’s an impression. Then there're affiliates. Affiliates get a bad rap because they tend to steal conversion. There’s cash back, discount based, creative educational and acquisition based affiliates. It’s more tricky to calculate. There’s email. Email marketing is also big in generating sales and revenue. we have not only understand the value of an email click but opened without a click. Email has a huge impact on returning customers who’ve previously converted. Attribution is not only for digital presence but also offline like TV, direct mail, etc. Russell discusses how these can affect on your attribution. Brochures, flyers, etc. play a large role for some companies. He gives an idea of what to look at.

Russell talks about strategic application of attribution. He explains how attribution gives a better understanding of the customer by looking the relationship between marketing and impact. Finding the value of a brand is though. With mapping out a customer life journey/cycle we can figure out an idea. Russell talks about how to calculate and understand lifetime value. He says we have to first segment users, what was their first purchase and how much value do you have on that user. What is value of a user is a question that we have to ask.