Understanding Your Most Successful Touchpoints: The Multi-source Attribution Model

Marketing experts have put forth many concepts of how to attribute leads and conversion to marketing tactics. For the greatest insights into what’s working best for you and leading to new business, you should use a multi-source attribution model that weighs the value of each touchpoint.

While it is more complicated to measure than the first-touch or last-touch models, it is far superior because it provides an understanding of the influence each of your marketing channels and outreach efforts have on conversions.

Here’s why.

What Is the Multi-source Attribution Model in Marketing?

Within the concept of multi-source attribution is a variety of attribution models all with one crucial characteristic: credit for the conversion goes to all interactions with the client from the moment they meet you until they convert.

These models include:

1. Linear Attribution

Using this model, you give equal weight to all touchpoints leading up to conversion. For example, if your customer finds you via search, then follows posts on social media, engages with your email list and finally places an order thanks to a personalized sales message, each interaction gets equal weight. 

Pros

• Allows you to give credit to all marketing touchpoints that the customer interacted with. 
• Easy to set up and track no matter how sophisticated your marketing tools are.

Cons

• Can overvalue some interactions that have minimal impact on the customer. 
• Challenging to determine the most valuable marketing channels using this model.

2. Time Decay Attribution

Similar to linear attribution, the credit for conversions goes to all marketing interactions. But the weight of that credit increases as the customer gets closer to conversion. For example, the first interaction might get only 20%, the second 24%, third 26% and the final interaction 30%. 

How you weigh the various interactions is up to you, but the last interaction will always get the greatest weight.

Pros

• Ideal for relationship-based businesses, assuming that the relationship gets stronger with each touchpoint.
• Can help you determine the most influential touchpoints leading up to a customer conversion.

Cons

• Fails to tell the whole story, especially when a business has a short sales cycle.
• Might incorrectly give minimal weight to early interactions that have great value to attracting new customers.

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3. U-shaped Attribution

Using this attribution model, you’ll give the greatest weight to the customer’s first and last touchpoints with minimal weight to everything in between. For example, if a customer finds you via a Google search ad, then interacts with your Instagram account, signs up to receive emails and finally converts via an email campaign, you’ll give the greatest weight to the Google search ad and the email campaign. 

Pros

• Ideal for businesses with a longer sales cycle that need multiple touchpoints to ensure a conversion.
• Still provides credit to all touchpoints while highlighting those that brought the customer in and led to a sale.

Cons

• Can underestimate the value of some touchpoints.
• Conversion credit can be spread too thin to measure effectively for companies with complex sales cycles requiring many touchpoints.

4. Custom Attribution Model

Arguably, this is the best, most robust attribution model. But also the most challenging to implement and requires the most robust marketing software and tools.

This model is completely customized based on your sales cycle and your clients’ goals. It requires deep insights into historical trends to know the performance of marketing channels.

Using this model, you’ll get the best insights into the value of your marketing strategies. You just have to know what you’re doing or work with the best experts in marketing to implement this model.

Pros

• Offers the most detailed and insightful attribution for customer acquisitions and conversions.
• Customized marketing insights based on your clients and their goals.

Cons

• Challenging attribution model to implement.
• Requires excellent data both historically and ongoingly 

The Problem with First- and Last-touch Models

To understand the issues with first and last-interaction models you have to first understand how they work. 

The first-touch model gives all conversion credit to the first way you interact with a customer. So if a customer finds you via Instagram, that channel gets all the credit for converting the customer. But in reality, conversion requires far more than that one interaction. You also need to nurture them with text messages and emails to showcase why they should finalize their purchase with you.

The first-touch model ignores the additional Google search ads they interact with and the eBook download from your website and the personalized recommendations email that helps them understand your products and how they relate to their needs.

The last-touch model works similarly only it gives all credit of the conversion to the last interaction with your business. You might also hear this model called last-click or last-interaction. When employing this model, you give no credit to the various parts of the customer journey. Instead, the last interaction gets all the credit.

Using last-touch attribution discounts the value of nurturing customers. It also doesn’t account for the large expenditures in building brand awareness and bringing in new customers. 

Both models are shortsighted and give no credit to the process of welcoming a new customer. They don’t consider the value of relationship building and progressively learning more about a prospect to tailor their experience for them, ultimately leading to a conversion.

While these are the easiest attribution models to implement, they do little to guide your marketing efforts and help you hone your strategies to get the most from every customer interaction since they ignore the value of so many customer interactions.

How to Choose and Implement an Attribution Model

The challenges in implementing and managing a multi-source attribution model often lead businesses to use single-source models. And then they wonder why their cost per lead isn’t decreasing or their conversion rates aren’t increasing.

Measuring marketing effectiveness and gaining a greater understanding of what you should be doing to support the customer in their journey to completing a purchase is complex. 

Choosing an attribution model requires that you evaluate the following.

• Your sales cycle, its length and the number of touchpoints included. Companies with longer sales cycles tend to require more involved attribution models. That’s because the typical number of touchpoints can be at least a dozen. In these sectors, the single-touch attribution models skew results and measurements even more. And when the sales cycle lasts longer than 90 days, first-touch attribution models fail to give credit to top-of-the-funnel interactions.
• Online versus offline channels. Companies with more offline interactions might find gaps in tracking or need to build workarounds for including these touchpoints in their marketing. You might need to include campaign-specific codes or get creative in how you track touchpoints outside of digital communication.
• The software you use and its sophistication. Some software is too simplistic to handle programming it for custom attribution models. Interoperability among all marketing channels is also essential to capture every touchpoint, and some software might not interface with things like personal emails from your sales team. The better the software, the more insights you’ll garner from your marketing activities.

Ultimately, the marketing attribution model you select should be multi-source and give appropriate weight to each marketing activity within the constraints of your technology and skills.Working with a marketing expert can take the guesswork out of your attribution modeling. New Light Digital understands the complexities that various business types face when it comes to attribution. We’ll work with you to determine the best attribution model and help you build a custom analytics process to increase conversion rates while lowering your cost per conversion. Schedule your free consultation now.

Further reading:

• Local SEO Tactics for Multi-Location Businesses: Best Practices
• Social Media Metrics: Measuring Success in Your Campaigns
• LinkedIn Advertising: A Guide to B2B Marketing Success
• Local SEO vs. Global SEO: Choosing the Right Strategy