What is attribution analysis? Attribution is simply the journey or path a customer takes to get to the sale or conversion. The analysis is investigating those paths and why they were efficient or not.
(Mini rant: Don't you hate searching for an explanation online and sifting through websites with an endless amount of AI-generated information? Somewhere along the line, these websites began to want to rank higher in search engines rather than providing good wholesome adequate information. The first thing I think of after searching websites and sifting through the sponsored results is TL;DR which means Too Long; Didn't Read. Let me not be one of those! Ok rant over! )
How Does Data Driven Attribution Work?
I asked myself that question not too long ago. As an MBA working on his digital marketing major, this was one of the most fascinating subjects I researched. As discussed above, attribution is the path the customer takes to get to the conversion click. Attribution analysis is the study of this information (data) to find the most efficient (or not) venues in which the consumers spent the most effort traveling.
Attribution Analysis: The Wizard of Oz Example
Dorothy landed in the weird land of OZ (landing page). She wanted to go home (desired outcome), so the munchkins told her to follow the yellow brick road (the path taken to the outcome). She valued going home so much that she was invested in following the yellow brick road to Emerald City to see the Great and Powerful OZ. She met the scarecrow (cool little snippet), cowardly lion (keywords), and Tin Man (interactive buttons and images), all of which also helped her get to The Wizard of Oz.
The gang encountered many obstacles, like bad content (The Wicked Witch), massive TL;DR articles, excessive spam, annoying flying monkeys, I mean pop-up ads. However, because the promise of going home was what Dorothy was after, she continued on the path, until she reached The GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ! who of course was a major dud.
Now, compare that to a website where you want the customer to buy your Great and Powerful Widget. How would you do an attribution analysis? Perhaps, invest in building more yellow brick roads. Maybe, hire a flying monkey pest control. Also, use funding to buy Wicked Witch repellent. Now any Dorothy landing in OZ and wants to go home will have no problems, and get there quicker!
That is how attribution analysis works!
How Does Data Driven Attribution Work? The Non-Fiction Example
Hopefully, you now have an idea of what data driven attribution is, and how it works. Bringing it to reality, business owners and organizations are interested in a return on investment (ROI). It is calculated by the Income of all efforts - the cost of those efforts/ Divided by the cost of those efforts. Income-Cost/Cost = ROI
Digital marketing attribution analysis involves investing in paid, earned, and owned media. Investing in those that work best. Analytics explores the pages a website is most landed on, the time users spend on it (session and engagement), and the directions they take to reach the conversion.
It also involves removing or tweaking poor content that repels or hinders that path. It is as simple as that!
Final Thoughts
I hope you've enjoyed my little simple blurb on attribution analysis. If you're here, you are either in a digital marketing class, are a marketing freak (like myself), or are trying to figure out why the Wizard of Oz has pop-up windows. Overall, I hope this was informative and valuable to you in some way. I will do an attribution analysis on it waayyy in the future when I actually can gather some data!
If you want to read up on attribution analysis, this is a good article: https://www.semrush.com/blog/marketing-attribution. You can also read my review on Semrush, an analytic tool, just for giggles.
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