Marketing Attribution Software

What is Marketing Attribution?

Marketers are constantly running digital and offline campaigns across one or many channels (e.g. email, social, web, direct mail, etc). Their primary goal is to connect with potential and existing customers and provide them with a personalized digital experience.

But this means brands end up having multiple different interactions with prospects and customers throughout a campaign. Marketing attribution helps marketers understand the impact and value (or ROI) each online and offline touchpoint has. Thus the goal of marketing attribution is to help marketers figure out which advertisements, content, messaging, and channels contribute the most to success. For most organizations, success is defined as one or more of the following:

• increased conversions
• increased pipeline
• increased revenue

Attribution analysis helps marketers assess their overall campaign strategy, figure out which touchpoints and channels are the biggest drivers of success, and make adjustments where necessary. For example, attribution analysis may reveal that display ads convert better than search ads (PPC) for a specific audience segment.

Marketing attribution tools are incredibly important in the consumer space, especially among retailers and ecommerce businesses. These tools are also relevant for B2B companies but are less widely used than they are in the B2C world.

Marketing Attribution Models

There are a few core marketing attribution models organizations use. Not all models work equally well for every business. So marketers should think carefully before deciding which model to use.

Here are some of the most common types of marketing attribution models:

First-touch

First-touch attribution models give all the credit to the first point of contact the prospect or customer had with your brand. So if a prospect received an email, then saw an ad on social, and then received another email—the outcome of that lead making a purchase would be 100% attributed to the first email they received.

Last-touch

Similar to the first-touch approach, last-touch attribution gives all the credit for converting a lead to the last touchpoint. While first-touch attribution doesn’t account for continued engagement after the first point of contact, the last-touch model doesn’t account for prior forms of engagement.

Multi-touch attribution

Multi-touch/source attribution models aim to account for all the different touchpoints a lead engaged with before converting. This could be multiple touchpoints within one campaign or several interactions across different campaigns. Under the umbrella of multi-touch/source attribution are a few key ways to weight the different engagement touchpoints:

• Linear: weights all interactions equally.
• U-shaped: weights each interaction individually, giving the first and last touchpoints higher weightings.
• Time decay: weights interactions closest to the time of conversion or purchase the highest.
• W-shaped: weights the first, last, and middle ‘opportunity creation’ touchpoints more than others.

Marketers should keep in mind that no attribution model is perfect or completely rules out all forms of bias. But the consistency of approach is almost as important as how well the model fits your business.

Marketing Attribution Biases

Most prospects and customers will have multiple interactions with a brand, potentially both online and offline. This makes it difficult to separate the impact of one specific touchpoint from all the other touchpoints a customer may have received.

There are different types of biases that marketers should be aware of as they conduct attribution analysis, to make sure they are not misattributing the success of a specific touchpoint or campaign.

For example, correlation bias is when it looks like one event causes another when it’s actually unclear if the two are related. In-market bias can be another source of frustration for marketers trying to conduct attribution analysis. This happens when something like an ad gets credit for converting a customer that would have made a purchase with or without having seen the ad.

Marketing Attribution Software Features

Most marketing attribution software will have the following core features:

• Owned media attribution
• Ad network & DSPS attribution
• Mobile attribution
• TV/OTT attribution
• Retargeting attribution
• Multi-touch attribution
• Multi-channel attribution
• Audience segmentation
• Ad network partnerships
• Ad spend aggregation and tracking
• Marketing analytics dashboard
• Deep linking
• Fraud protection

Marketing Attribution Software Comparison

For marketers evaluating different marketing attribution or measurement platforms, make sure to consider these six key factors:

1. Cost: does the price of the platform match your organization’s budget?
2. User experience: how user-friendly is the platform overall, and will your team feel comfortable using it?
3. Platform focus: is attribution the core focus of the platform, or is it primarily focused on other areas like traffic analysis or campaign automation?
4. Geographic reach: are you looking for a global platform or one that operates within one specific world region?
5. Customer and technical support: what type of support does the vendor offer? Do you need to pay more for higher levels of access to support?
6. Integrations: does the platform integrate with the ad networks, paid media channels, and other third-party systems you use?

Pricing Information

Pricing for marketing attribution platforms can vary based on several factors. Products that include additional capabilities typically cost more than products that squarely focus on measuring attribution across channels.

The pricing model differs across platforms too. For example, both AppsFlyer and Kochava have a free version of their platform, though with limited capabilities. After the free tier, AppsFlyer charges 6 cents per conversion, while Kochava has plans starting at $100 per month that can be based on conversions or monthly active users (MAU).