Attribution Matters

You would think the IDE religious war is bad. The arguments on attribution model in the marketing world is as bad. For those who don’t know what attribution means. Here is a simple explanation.

Attribution — The model that decides which campaign/traffic channel should get the credit for conversion.

Here is an example.

1. User searches on Google for term “PS3”. You will see 2 links for PS3 one is a paid ad link and other SEO link from Sony.
2. User clicks on the SEO link. User lands on Sony does some searches and then leaves — This goes into Organic search bucket
3. Now the same day user ends on a affiliate site. Searches for PS3 and finds the same model with same price and lands on Sony again — This goes into the campaign bucket visit number. User does some searches and decides that he wants to buy a PS3 at this point.
4. Later that week user gets an email from Sony (Targeted Email campaign) for the same PS3. User clicks on that and ends up on the site again — Goes into the Email campaign bucket. Somehow he doesn’t end up buying and leaves
5. Finally a week later user comes directly to sony.com and buys the hotel
So far we have had 4 channels (EMKT, EMAIL, ORGANIC,DIRECT). So who should get the credit for this?

The first generation of web analytics was all about server side tagging and in house IT teams focusing on measurement. 
The second generation was dominated by marketing departments utilizing hosted solutions(read webtrends, Google analytics, omniture etc..) and client side tagging.

The primary value these two generations of solutions provided were aggregate reports, along with rudimentary ad-hoc analysis capabilities.

“The Third generation of web analtyics”

The third is certainly about the data – the open access to un-aggregated visitor detail data and the endless forms of true analysis that can be performed with it.

Attribution model 1 : Last click attribution.
Attribution model 2 : First click attribution
Attribution model 3 : Equal attribution

Attribution Kick ass — Statistical modeling based attribution

In closing what every business really dies to have is Tying the three data sources

1. Demand or else source of entry data
2. Visit data (All Site analytics data)
2. Transaction data