So does your Enterprise need a multi-channel attribution strategy? Without doubt. We could extend a dozen reasons, but here are two of them: the online and digital worlds have made a customer’s journey complex, different channels, such as social media, for example, affect buying decisions in various ways; and marketers risk reporting misleading ‘Return on Investment’ (ROI) if they fail to implement a multi-touch attribution plan.
What is Multi-Touch Attribution Modeling?
Multi-touch attribution modeling measures and acknowledges the various touchpoints that occur before a sale is closed in a customer’s journey – at every stage of the marketing funnel, from product/service awareness to lead creation, nurture, and conversion.
Traditional first- or last-click attribution methods are no longer sufficient, and you should replace them with a multi-touch attribution system immediately.
If you want an even more technical explanation, here’s how research agency Forrester once defined multi-channel attribution modeling: it’s the science of using advanced analytics to allocate proportional credit to each marketing touchpoint across all online and offline channels, leading to the desired customer action.
So does your Enterprise need multi-touch attribution models? If you answer ‘Yes’ to most of the questions below, it does.
- Is your revenue growth stagnant?
- Does your business sell through multiple channels, both offline and online, such as brick-and-mortar stores as well as a website?
- Is your marketing team under pressure to make every marketing dollar work?
- Do you currently use last-click modeling?
- Is a fair bit of data lying untapped in your CRM?
Benefits of Multi-Touch Attribution Marketing Model
- It is the holistic method of measuring digital marketing/advertising attribution
- Demonstrates the functionality and value of campaigns
- Optimizes customer interactions
- Helps marketers spend smarter since the model provides accurate insights into the marketing influences across devices and channels
- Helps monitor a customer’s journey across devices and channels, highlighting which play critical roles on the path to sales
Think of the multi-touch attribution marketing model as a seven-course meal, the latter representing the marketing funnel.
The entrée introduces you to the main course, and the dessert is a sign-off, perhaps of a successful meal, i.e., the last touch. In between lies the main stuff.
The challenge for marketers lies in understanding the points in the middle (just as the challenge in fine dining is to understand which cutlery to use for which dish).
The labyrinth of online conversion tracking is complex and is likely to confuse marketers as they try to untangle the web of unstructured data.
Challenges in Multi-Touch Attribution Modeling
Online tracking: Collecting data from desktops, mobile devices, advertising channels, social media, and other sources to present a holistic picture of the customer’s journey continues to be challenging.
As the importance of mobile computing devices continues to grow, cross-device attribution becomes increasingly critical.
Cross-device modeling operates on people-based, data-driven attribution across networks, so newer models need to be developed instead of the current practice of cookie tracking to track all interactions.
Again, mere clicks do not completely represent a channel’s value. If this point is not factored in, there’s a high chance that it may lead to inadequate measurement.
Multi-Touch Attribution Model Example
Just because ads on a spurious site get you a vast number of clicks should not pull you into thinking that you are getting the bang for the buck for your advertising dollar.
That’s why, in display advertising, many marketers rely on conversion rates rather than only measuring clicks.
Technical: There’s a paucity of skills required to deploy Big Data tech to manage the intricacies around the processing and the transformation of high volumes of data to enable statistical analysis.
What is also often lacking is the understanding required to link an enterprise’s business objectives to the real contribution of marketing activities, while simultaneously keeping an eye on the relationships between channels.
To remain agile and adapt to the rapidly changing marketing ecosystem, organizations will need to make their multi-touch attribution models highly customizable.
Some experts suggest that the best approach would be to develop models that help organizations create marketing plans based on specific goals. For example: Maximizing sales.
How to build a multi-touch attribution model? Building an ideal multi-touch attribution model requires the “demystifying” of your data, especially in the mid-funnel area. Express Analytics offers solutions built on machine-learning algorithms and intelligent modeling to help your business analyze the value of your customers’ interactions at various touchpoints in their digital journey.