How to Implement Multi Touch Attribution Modeling?

How to Implement Multi Touch Attribution Modeling?

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 different ways; and marketers risk reporting misleading ‘Return on Investment’ (ROI) if they fail to implement a multi-touch attribution plan. How to implement Multi Touch Attribution Modeling?

What is Multi Touch Attribution Modeling?

Multi touch attribution modeling is to measure and acknowledge the various touchpoints before the closure of a sale in a customer’s journey – at every stage of the marketing funnel – from product/service awareness to lead creation to nurture to conversion.

Traditional first or last-click attribution methods are no longer enough, and you need to immediately replace those with the multi touch attribution system.

If you want an even more technical explanation, here’s how research agency Forrester defined multi-channel attribution modeling once – 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 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

1. It is the holistic method of measuring digital marketing/advertising attribution
2. Demonstrates the functionality and value of campaigns
3. Optimizes customer interactions
4. Helps marketers spend smarter since the model provides accurate insights into the marketing influences across devices and channels
5. 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 entree introduces you to the main course, 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 difficult and is most likely to muddle marketers as they try to untangle the web of unstructured data.

Challenges in Multi Touch Attribution Modeling

Online tracking: Collection of data from desktop, mobile, advertising channels, social media, to name a few – to present a holistic picture of the customer’s journey, continues to be difficult.

As the importance of mobile computing devices grows, cross-device attribution becomes even more critical.

Cross-device modeling operates on people-based, data-driven attribution, across networks, so newer models need to be worked out instead of the present-day practice of cookie tracking to track all the 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 lull 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 measure 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 objective to the real contribution of marketing activity, while simultaneously keeping an eye on the relationships between channels.

To become agile, and keeping in mind the rapidly changing marketing ecosystem, organizations will need to make their multi touch attribution models highly customizable.

Some experts suggest the best way would be to develop models that help organizations draw up 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.