What is marketing attribution? A beginner’s guide

Advertising touchpoints are abundant—they’re in inboxes, they show up during live TV shows, or while website browsing. These touchpoints are interconnected, working together to help customers determine their final destination: the conversion. But understanding the path to that destination is just as valuable as the destination itself. Marketing attribution models enable advertisers to measure and optimize the unique touchpoints that lead to conversions and sales. Understanding how consumers go through their shopping journeys is crucial—and that's where digital marketing attribution comes in.

Marketing attribution is the way advertisers determine how marketing tactics—and subsequent customer interactions—contributed to sales, conversions, or other goals.

These marketing metrics are used to identify the channels and messages that inspire potential buyers to take action. The models consider various touchpoints in the marketing funnel and their impact on consumer behavior and conversions. This attribution can be achieved through solutions like Amazon Ad Server that serve as catalysts to measure and analyze these touchpoints along the customer journey.

Marketing tactics and corresponding customer touchpoints can range from social media channels to emails to paid search—and every digital marketing interaction in between. Using these models can be as simple as analyzing one touchpoint and as complex as considering the intersections of multiple touchpoints across the path to purchase. Either way, marketing funnel and customer journey modeling are incredibly important to return on investment (ROI), future strategy planning, and more.

When it comes to marketing, knowledge is power—the more you can learn about your past results, the better you can plan your future tactics. Analyzing your current marketing objectives and taking subsequent marketing actions can create a ripple effect for your brand’s strategy. It helps ensure that every single past interaction is accounted for and considered when making future decisions. With so many marketing touchpoints to consider and an increasingly complex customer journey, it’s crucial that brands take a step back to review where they stand and how they may be able to optimize. But unsurprisingly, the sheer amount of reporting available can feel overwhelming.

That’s where marketing attribution comes in—it helps automate the evaluation process to ensure that you’re getting the most relevant and accurate metrics and KPIs possible. These learnings will help enable you to make smarter, more efficient updates to your marketing team’s tactics and drive more optimization for your business.

The diverse nature of this information and the quantity of potential touchpoints makes marketing attribution even more important. The ability of analytical tools to pull factors from various sources means the learnings from this attribution paint the full picture of your marketing performance and audience behaviors. For example, some analytical tools can consider device type, order of exposure, and type of asset when analyzing marketing touchpoints.

One of the other most crucial aspects of marketing attribution is its ability to improve your ROI. It can reveal information that enables you to optimize marketing spend, and it can help improve remarketing efforts and relevance for audiences.

Marketing attributions can be helpful when trying to reach business goals, but what are some potential problems with this process?

As you may have noticed, marketing attribution is a complex process—but depending on your brand’s goals and needs, it doesn’t have to be so complicated. Luckily, the wide variety of marketing attribution models enable you to pinpoint which specific strategy is right for your brand. There are two broad categories of attribution models: single source and multi-touch. Single source gives all the credit to one touchpoint, while multi-touch models give credit to each contributing channel. Let’s explore what these different models are and when to use them, starting with single source attribution models.

The wide variety of attribution model types gives you the opportunity to tailor your strategy to your brand’s needs and goals. But with so many different options, it can be challenging to identify the best one for you. There are a few factors to consider when deciding which model to use, including:

Let’s explore an example of how answers to these questions may impact a business’s attribution model choice. Say a shoe company is hoping to learn more about their customers’ behaviors after their recent email marketing campaign. Their sales cycle is very short and customer touchpoints are relatively condensed. The company is only leveraging one channel—email—and their creative assets on that channel are pretty simple. The goal of the campaign is to drive sales. This particular brand may want to choose a single source attribution model, such as first-touch or last-touch, because they won’t need to worry as much about the limited touchpoints within their customers’ paths to purchase; they’re only focusing on a conversion-related goal, and they’re using a more direct channel.

Of course, this plan is unique to this specific sample company. Your answers and subsequent results may look a little different. Every brand is unique, so attribution models are unique too. On top of the factors in the list above, it’s critical to think about the other needs and goals of your brand before making an attribution model decision.

After you decide on an attribution model, it’s time to start implementing it. But as you may have noticed, marketing attribution can be a robust and detailed process. There’s a lot to consider when jumping into this kind of analysis, so it’s important to keep a few best practices below in mind.

The customer journey isn’t always linear. It can be complex, varied, and sometimes even unusual. Digital marketing attribution helps you make sense of these patterns and behaviors, and the variety of attribution models ensures you can do so in the most effective and efficient way possible. It’s important to understand that marketing attribution isn’t one big thing—it’s a million little things. And Amazon Ads' tools can help you piece those touchpoints and interactions together.