Attribution – which way do you do it?
Posted: Sat Jan 18, 2025 7:19 am
Attribution is definitely a hot topic at the moment and at the Adobe Marketing Summit there were a number of really good sessions on it (there were also a number of insane equations flying around too that I won’t get into).
So, what is attribution?
It’s about divvying up the spoils. It’s about applying credit (usually a dollar value, but can be a number such as leads etc) for a conversion to the thing or things that contributed to the conversion. For example: let’s assume someone came to your site and spent $1,000. Using different models, you’d split that $1,000 across the different channels that they interacted with.
Most of the world still seems to continue to use Last Touch attribution – that is, they say the most important thing that drove someone to convert was the last thing they touched – which might be a Paid Search ad, or a Display Ad, or an Email etc.
But in reality, 60% of visitors interact with our sites through many seychelles email list 16461 contact leads different touch points*, and so giving credit to the last one is neither fair, nor realistic. So, we use attribution to figure out what channels they interacted with and give those channels a different percentage of the conversion.
(*Forrester)
There are many different types of attribution and they tend to be fairly specific to each company:
First Touch – assign all credit from the conversion to the first channel they interacted with.
Last Touch – assign all credit from the conversion to the last channel they interacted with.
Equal Weight – assigns an equal credit to all of the channels that drove conversion.
Mid Weight – also called Starter, Player Closer. This assigns an amount to the first and the last channels, and then an equal split across the channels in the middle.
Adjacency – gives a weighted score based on the position to the conversion, for example, the highest score is given to the channel closest to conversion, a lower score to those further away from conversion.
Latency – same concept as adjacency but uses a time scale to help determine the scores.
So, what is attribution?
It’s about divvying up the spoils. It’s about applying credit (usually a dollar value, but can be a number such as leads etc) for a conversion to the thing or things that contributed to the conversion. For example: let’s assume someone came to your site and spent $1,000. Using different models, you’d split that $1,000 across the different channels that they interacted with.
Most of the world still seems to continue to use Last Touch attribution – that is, they say the most important thing that drove someone to convert was the last thing they touched – which might be a Paid Search ad, or a Display Ad, or an Email etc.
But in reality, 60% of visitors interact with our sites through many seychelles email list 16461 contact leads different touch points*, and so giving credit to the last one is neither fair, nor realistic. So, we use attribution to figure out what channels they interacted with and give those channels a different percentage of the conversion.
(*Forrester)
There are many different types of attribution and they tend to be fairly specific to each company:
First Touch – assign all credit from the conversion to the first channel they interacted with.
Last Touch – assign all credit from the conversion to the last channel they interacted with.
Equal Weight – assigns an equal credit to all of the channels that drove conversion.
Mid Weight – also called Starter, Player Closer. This assigns an amount to the first and the last channels, and then an equal split across the channels in the middle.
Adjacency – gives a weighted score based on the position to the conversion, for example, the highest score is given to the channel closest to conversion, a lower score to those further away from conversion.
Latency – same concept as adjacency but uses a time scale to help determine the scores.