Marketers Who Don’t Understand Attribution Modeling Lose Business & Here’s Why

In business, there are a number of ways you can develop long-lasting relationships with clients. Unfortunately, there are also just as many ways you can unintentionally destroy well-established client relationships. They say a loyal client is an educated one. Taking the time to educate your clients is one of the most effective ways you can build and strengthen sustainable, money-making relationships overtime. When you don’t take time to educate, your clients look to others to address their needs, their concerns—their problems.

If you’re an internet marketer, you probably put together regular weekly or monthly reports and send them to your clients to review. But how often do you spend time going through reports with them and actually educating them on how to interpret the data they receive?

Attribution modeling is one analytics concept that every internet marketer can and should spend more time educating their clients on in order to build and strengthen loyalty month over month.
The average person using the web (non-geeks, your clients, etc.) probably has no idea what ‘Attribution Modeling’ is. In fact I’m willing to bet that many experienced  internet marketers still have no idea what it is or how it works either.

Google is partly to blame for that. They don’t do a very good job of explaining the concept in a way that makes sense to people. Sure, they have published a few articles and videos here and there, but they don’t really make any sense to the average web user or even marketing professional looking for more information on the subject. The documentation they provide to users is a lot like all the other content they publish on their help sections about how to use their tools and systems: it’s thorough, but it’s also complex and often confusing.

So what is attribution modeling, and why should I teach my clients about it?

Attribution modeling is a simply a process of understanding and assigning credit for conversions to various marketing channels on the web.

It’s essential that as a marketer you understand how this conversion tool actually works. It’s even more important that you help your clients understand how it works too. Why? Doing so can help you keep them longer.

Related Post: You are doing Google Analytics all wrong. Here is why

A scenario that might be all too familiar to you

Have you ever received an email from a client that looks like this?
Hi

I will put payment through. But I have to ask, are you happy with the results so far? Our cost per acquisition is so high. We don’t see any ROI for our AdWords campaigns. If this continues after this month we will have to discontinue using your services.

Regards
Your client

It’s frustrating, right? In this example,  the client is referring to cost per acquisition as reported by Google Adwords which is actually the cost per last ad click acquisition. Here’s where being able to educate your client on attribution modeling becomes important the important:  Since your client is not aware of the ‘last ad click attribution model’ used by Google Adwords and not really familiar with attribution modeling in general, he or she has no reason to doubt his or her interpretation of data.

He doesn’t understand how different marketing channels work together to create a conversion. He doesn’t understand the conversion path followed by his customers. He has no idea of his client’s actual purchase behavior.

He simply believes whatever he sees and thinks he can interpret on his own in the analytics/AdWords reports.

His conclusions are purely based on observation. In short: he’s  data blind.

This is not really his fault—it’s yours for not taking the time to educate your client. In the end, you lose clients not because you aren’t doing your job, but because they lack an understanding of essential concepts and tools like attribution modeling.

Monitoring and tracking purchasing behavior online using attribution modeling

For online consumers, the online purchase journey is not as simple as clicking an ad and then making a purchase straight away. People rarely make a purchase on their very first visit to a site or product page. They generally visit website multiple times via same or different devices/channels before finally deciding to make a purchase.

Sometimes visitors may click on your ads but make a purchase through different acquisition channel, medium or device.

For example, a person may click on your paid search ad through laptop at work and not end up making a purchase until later when they get home via their  home desktop PC through a branded organic keyword.
In this case Google Analytics will attribute conversion to the branded organic keyword as it completed the sale and the paid search keyword will get no credit for conversion.

So in your Google Analytics/ Google Adwords report, you won’t see any conversion for the paid search keyword. This may give the impression that paid search keyword is not the right keyword to target.

You can see the problem here: if you are unaware of the role played by prior acquisition channels, you will credit conversions and e-commerce transactions to wrong acquisition channels, like in the present case to branded organic keywords.

Another example to consider: a person may click on your Facebook ad through iPad at work and then later directly visit the website via home laptop to make a purchase.

In this case Google Analytics will attribute conversion to direct traffic and the Facebook ad will get no credit for conversion. So again, in your Google Analytics report you won’t see any conversion for the Facebook ad. This may give the impression that Facebook ad is not effective.

If you are unaware of the role played by prior acquisition channels, you will credit conversions and e-commerce transactions to wrong acquisition channels, like in the present case to direct traffic.

One thing to note: No one acquisition channel is solely responsible for sales in the world of multi-channel marketing. People are generally exposed to multiple acquisition/marketing channels and devices before they click on your ad and make a purchase.

Another thing worth pointing out is that direct traffic is not a traffic source. It is users’ behavior.

Direct traffic is always a result of some marketing campaign whether online or offline (like word of mouth).

So as the traffic from Facebook /AdWords campaigns will increase, it will most likely increase the direct traffic too.

If you judge the performance of a campaign/keyword by how many sales/conversion it directly completed/closed then you end up getting a very inaccurate picture.

If a keyword/ad/campaign is not directly completing a sale then it may be assisting the sale somewhere in the conversion path. And if you stop targeting them, you will lose the assistance you were getting in closing the sale and thus you will lose money.

We call this process of understanding and assigning credit for conversion and sales to right marketing channel/medium/device as ‘Attribution Modelling’.

Wrapping up

To learn more about the basics of attribution modeling, read the following article: Google Analytics Attribution Modeling – Beginners Guide.

For attribution modeling in Google Adwords, read this article: Google Adwords Attribution – Complete Guide

Once you understand attribution modeling, only then you can explain it to others. If you don’t educate your clients about attribution modeling they will blindly follow whatever data/analytics reports have to say and will give credit to the wrong marketing channels, medium, ads and keywords.

When you educate your clients, you demonstrate your subject matter expertise, bring transparency into your work, build customer loyalty, and ensure that your clients continue doing business with you.

Himanshu is the founder of Optimize Smart (formerly ‘SEO Takeaways’), a UK based digital marketing consultancy which specializes in SEO, PPC management and Analytics Consultation