Today’s average path to purchase involves 56 touch points across various platforms. This proliferation of channels introduces a new layer of complexity and complicates creative alignment, as disjointed campaigns lead to consumer distrust and frustration.
If marketers can’t identify which combinations of channels are working or, more importantly, which ones aren’t, effectively prioritizing ad spend becomes nearly impossible. With the right attribution model, marketers can centralize metrics to visualize the entire customer journey, prioritize budgets to maximize ad spend, and make data-backed recommendations to leadership. These tools help centralize and normalize data and ensure that it is clean, deduplicated, and ready for deeper analysis.
Choosing the right attribution model can be complicated. Here are the most common types, along with their pros and cons.
Full-path model
This model is the most extensive and technical since it provides the most comprehensive tracking of a customer’s journey, recording every marketing interaction they encounter from the first touch point to the final conversion. It accounts for all marketing efforts, such as display ads, social media interactions, email campaigns, and even post-purchase engagements, making it highly effective for in-depth analysis of what works and what doesn’t.
It provides a detailed, end-to-end view of the customer journey, allowing marketers to accurately attribute revenue to specific marketing efforts. It also helps optimize budget allocation by highlighting the most influential touch points in the customer journey and supports strategic decision-making by revealing how different channels work together to influence conversions.
However, it requires significant resources, including advanced analytics tools and skilled personnel to manage and interpret the data, and can be time-consuming to set up and maintain.
Linear attribution
This model assigns equal value to all touch points in a customer’s journey. For example, if a customer finds you on Facebook, then signs up for your newsletter, and finally clicks an email link before making a purchase, each touch point would receive equal credit for the conversion.
It’s relatively easy to implement and understand, making it a practical option for teams with limited resources or those just beginning to explore multi-touch attribution. Assigning equal credit to all touch points in the customer journey emphasizes the value of every interaction. A downside, though, is that it lacks nuanced insights because it doesn’t account for the varying influence that different interactions may have on the final conversion.