Are Multi-Touch Attribution Models More Effective Than Last-Touch?
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When marketers look at the customer journey, they tend to focus on the following:
What actions did people take that led to a conversion?
Which touchpoints had the most influence along the way?
This is not a bad start. Both of these questions are essential to track the return on investment (ROI) of marketing channels. However, they may also offer limited insight into how customers found your brand in the first place and what inspired them to make their final decision.
Banks are in a unique situation in which data is baked into nearly every process. Because customers exchange personal information for nearly all your products, much of a customer’s lifecycle can be tracked back by data points. Data segmentation can help banks and other financial organizations track behavior against the customer lifecycle. Effective modeling can help illustrate important trends and other information.
Despite the advancements in data collection strategies, however, many financial marketers still find it difficult to measure marketing performance to conversion points along the customer journey. Because of this, many teams are unable to effectively measure which channels and campaigns are bringing in new customers.
From spending marketing dollars to planning for campaigns, many marketers know that data can help fill in the gaps. But measurement these days is much more nuanced than ever before. It requires a clean, effective data collection strategy.
To help illustrate the importance of clean data, let’s take a look at attribution models.
What is an Attribution Model?
Attribution models are designed to help marketers assign key events (formerly known as conversions) to touchpoints across a user’s journey. These days, there are a myriad of ways that a user can enter your site:
Direct entrance
Organic search
Paid search ads
Emails or newsletters
Web referrals
Social media
What’s more, a single user may visit your site multiple times—and may enter through different sources each time. By the time they convert, they’ll generally have had multiple interactions with your brand. Think about it: if you are looking for a new bank, are you going to convert on the first website you find? No, you are probably going to research a variety of financial institutions before making a decision.
Attribution models can help banks understand omnichannel marketing campaigns. They’re designed to assign credit to the different clicks along that journey, rather than giving credit to whatever channel moved the user across the finish line.
Single-Touch vs. Multi-Touch Marketing Attribution Models
Single-Touch Attribution
Single-touch attribution models map credit for a customer to a single touchpoint.
These models accredit a customer’s full revenue amount to one channel—regardless of how many touchpoints led to a conversion. The main two single-touch attribution models are:
Last click attribution gives all credit to the last clicked Google Ads ad and corresponding keyword in the conversion path. This is the default model used in Google Ads and is the most commonly used model.
First click attribution gives credit to the first clicked Google Ads ad and corresponding keyword.
Unless consumers have unwavering brand loyalty, it can be assumed that they will do more than one search for your brand, products, or services. Chances are, they’ll most likely have interactions with your competitors as well. The modern customer often takes hundreds of steps in their journey. And single-touch attribution only accounts for one step of that journey.
Multi-touch Attribution
While single-touch attribution models may have worked for finance organizations in the past, users may now enter and exit your website through several channels. Multi-touch attribution models are designed to share the credit across multiple touchpoints of a customer journey. Algorithmic-based models split the credit by assigning fractional credit to each touchpoint—so that marketers can see how much influence each channel has.
Multi-touch attribution is designed to eliminate biases by algorithmically allocating credit. Of course, there are many types of multi-touch models.
Below are two used by Google Ads.
Last click gives all credit for the conversion to the last clicked ad and keyword.
Data-driven attribution uses machine learning to split credit for conversions based on how people are searching for your business. It uses data from your account to determine which ads, keywords, and campaigns have the biggest impact on your goals.
Google Analytics 4 uses the following:
Data-driven attribution
Paid and organic last click ignores direct traffic and attributes 100% of the key event value to the last channel the customer clicked through before converting.
Google paid channels last click attributes 100% of the value to the last Google Ads channel the customer used.
Reporting Using Attribution Modeling
Knowing which attribution model to focus on for your company is an important first step. But where do you get the data? Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) both offer insights into the different attribution models mentioned above.
Google Ads
With Google’s recent glow-up, Attribution is even easier to find in your Google Ads account.
On the left-hand side of your account, you’ll see “Goals”. When you hover over it, there will be an option to select “Attribution”:
From there, you can start to dig into your data:
You can start to get insight into conversion paths, path metrics, assisted conversions, model comparisons, and more.
If you’d like to switch your attribution model, on the left-hand side you’ll see “Summary”:
Once you select that, you’ll see all your conversions that are currently configured in your account. Just simply select the conversion action you’d like to adjust, and edit the “Attribution” model you’d like to leverage:
Google Analytics 4
In GA4, the “Attribution models” report can be found under Advertising:
The report will show the different key event paths using two different models: Last-click and Data-driven.
Google Analytics also has an “Attribution paths” report, which is helpful to see what channels are being used throughout the user journey.
This analysis also reports on the common paths users will take before converting:
What Marketing Attribution Model is Right for Your Business?
Let’s consider attribution modeling through the lens of paid search.
Because PPC is becoming more and more automated, marketers may leverage smart bidding where Google sets bids based on specific campaigns. Or, marketers may use a rules-based approach to find keywords that aren’t driving conversions. However, many of these automations use conversion data to drive results. In a last-click attribution system, these automations may come across high-level keywords with no conversions—and may eliminate them automatically.
As this scenario illustrates, even automations require a human touch. While last-click attribution models may work when there are fewer interactions across a conversion path, the model is inherently risky to use when you’re leveraging automation.
Unfortunately, there’s no single attribution model that works for everyone. What works for one team may not work for the next. Single-touch models may be effective for financial teams with shorter sales cycles and fewer interactions across the customer journey. Conversely, multi-touch models may be better for teams with longer sales cycles and numerous touchpoints.
Spreading Your Marketing Efforts Across Multiple Channels
Ultimately, leveraging multiple channels like PPC and paid social media advertising can help you reduce over-reliance on any one single channel. As is the case with investing, diversification can help spread your efforts across many channels.
Portfolio diversification is underscored by variety. In finance and investment planning, it means combining a variety of assets in hopes of reducing the overall risk of your portfolio. The overall goal is risk management. By holding numerous assets, you help eliminate specific risks, such as reliance on industry. Because it can be assumed that different assets rise and fall at different times, diversification is defined by the idea of mitigating the returns of your overall portfolio.
The same can be said for digital marketing. By expanding the breadth of your marketing services, you only increase your reach. Attribution models exist as a way to correlate channels and campaigns with ROI. Tracking and attribution become an extension of each other—and are used as a way to maximize digital marketing budgets.
Regardless of which channels your financial marketing team uses, clean data is the foundation for effective tracking. Need help figuring out what to do with your data? Contact us today.
This blog post was originally published on February 21, 2020, and was updated and republished on September 3, 2024.
