A rule or framework used to distribute conversion credit across the touchpoints in a customer’s journey.
Different models can produce very different views of which marketing efforts appear most valuable.
Short and sweet:
A rule or framework used to distribute conversion credit across the touchpoints in a customer’s journey.
Different models can produce very different views of which marketing efforts appear most valuable.
See also: Attribution, First-Touch Attribution, Last-Touch Attribution
An attribution model is the specific rule set used to decide how credit for a conversion gets distributed across the various touchpoints a customer encountered along the way, ranging from simple approaches like first or last touch to more advanced multi-touch models that split credit proportionally across several interactions. Choosing one model over another can dramatically change how effective a given channel appears, since a channel that looks weak under last-touch attribution might look considerably stronger once earlier touchpoints get proper credit under a different model. Because no single model is perfectly accurate for every business, many marketers compare results across a couple of different models rather than trusting one method as the definitive answer.
A linear attribution model would split conversion credit evenly across every touchpoint a customer had with a brand, from an early Instagram ad all the way to the final Google search click.
Switching from a last-touch framework to a data-driven one revealed that a company’s YouTube ads were actually influencing far more sales than the reports had previously shown.
Marketing teams often disagree internally about which framework like this to trust, since a paid search manager and a social media manager can each look better or worse depending on the approach chosen.
