Alex Becker CEO/Founder of HYROS

What Is Digital Marketing Attribution?

Alex Becker CEO/Founder of HYROS

Hey hey, Hyrolians! Today, we’re gonna talk about digital marketing attribution. First off, do you actually understand digital marketing? Even if you don’t think so, you know more than you realize if you are online … And obviously, you are because you’re here.

Digital marketing is just about everywhere you look when you’re online. You’re seeing it in emails, paid search ads, and social media. Every single one of these avenues is meant to take users to the same place. So when people arrive at the desired digital destination, how do you know which path they took to get there?

And that path matters.

Let’s say you’re planning a road trip. You know you want to go to the beach. If you’re smart, you have some sort of app on your phone that shows you different routes to get your toes into the powdery sand.

Sometimes, when you are going to the beach, timing is everything. It can be the difference between rain, clouds, or sunshine. You typically want to get there to enjoy the surf and sun.

There is more than one way to get to the beach. And each route looks different. One goes through cute little towns with side roads and stop signs. It takes about ten hours of driving. Another one is shorter but full of curvy roads. You’ll drive for nine hours through the scenic landscape. And another one is straight up highways and takes you six-and-a-half hours of driving.

That’s a pretty big difference in drive time, right?

Two of those routes are full of distractions and delays. And one route is a surefire way to get to the beach the quickest. The quicker you get there, the more sunshine you’ll enjoy because you have more hours to spend on the sand.

The path you take to get to the final destination matters. It affects the timing, it affects your mood, it affects your readiness to take action.

In this case, somebody already did the research to know how long each path would take and what obstacles would come up along the way. You don’t know what happens along each path unless you’ve done the work to figure it out.

Researching the paths matters. Understanding digital marketing attribution matters.

If you want to understand what is directing your customer conversions, then you must get a true grip on digital marketing attribution. When you understand digital marketing attribution, you have the true analysis of your digital marketing strategies, showing you what works and what doesn’t.

What Is Digital Marketing Attribution?

You’ve probably heard the phrase about giving credit where credit is due. Digital marketing attribution is kinda like that. It allows you to trace the origin story of your customer’s buying choice. Who doesn’t like a good origin story?

If you’re pouring money into YouTube or TikTok or some other type of pay-per-click marketing but you don’t know how many people are actually buying from which of those, then you don’t know what your return on each of those investments is! That’s why you need some seriously good attribution analytics.

Your real analytics will help you determine where to spend your money so you can help your existing customers, and it’s the best way to find new ones. Make every penny count and put it toward the right channels so it will actually be spent on the right audience that will essentially pay you back for your efforts to cater to them.

The Basics of Measuring Digital Marketing Attribution

The name of the game in digital marketing attribution is pretty much all about giving credit where credit is due. WordPress and Google Analytics are two platforms that provide basic acumen for marketing attribution. These platforms can show you the following:

The final piece of content users engaged with outside of your website is given all of the credit. It’s considered a non-direct click.
The last piece of content a user engages with gets all of the credit is the final engagement.
The very first piece of content a user engages with gets all of the credit is the first engagement.

You’re probably feeling incredibly overwhelmed by that wealth of knowledge that just poured into your lap. What can I say? Told you it was basic. They don’t give much insight into what your actual customers were doing to get to you. Wouldn’t it be easy peasy if you could just post one little bit of content, and boom, you’ve got a new customer?

Sorry folks. That’s just not reality.

Guess what? Not only will it take more than one attempt to digitally attract your ideal customer, but it may also take you a minimum of five all the way up to twenty marketing impressions. Trying a multi-touch approach has most definitely become a thing.

Multi-touch attribution is fairly self-explanatory. You’re marketing through multiple channels and gathering the analytics for all of those pieces of content with the ultimate goal of getting your people to pull out their wallets and buy from you.

You might see multi-touch rule-based attribution like this:

U-shaped: Your lead conversion content as well as the initial bit of content are both given an equal forty percent of the credit. All of the other areas where a user has been reached are divided into the last twenty percent.

Time-Decay: Every bit of content receives credit, but the content the user has newly engaged with is given the majority of the credit.

W-Shaped: Lead conversion content, lead creation content, and the initial content all gets an equal thirty percent of the credit, the last ten percent goes to all the other areas the user has come in contact with.

Linear: All things are equal when it comes to the credit for the content users engage with.

In addition to these attribution models, there are also custom rule-based models. You’ll probably find these to be more time-consuming to set up. The analyst individually defines how much weight to attribute to each engagement along the user’s journey. You can set it up to specifically match your business strategy. But as careful and crafty as you may be, you’ll probably end up putting some bias in there. So your data is a tad skewed on this!

Aaaand we have one more attribution model for you, the algorithmic attribution model. When you want to remove bias, you can do it with this model. It uses data science and machine learning to determine the specific weight given to each engagement leading up to a sale. But …

This baby isn’t without its flaws. You can’t do this quickly. It takes time, copious amounts of data, and plenty of development for them to truly provide accurate feedback. Plus, you’ll need somebody who rreeeally knows data science to get the whole thing up and running. That is going to cost you a pretty penny. And just like that, you’ve probably defeated the original purpose of increasing your ROI (return on investment.)

The bottom line is that each digital marketing strategy is different, so how you create your multi-touch attribution model will be different, too. These analytics can sometimes be overly complicated. And that is not always a good thing.

You Need Attribution Tools

If you want to learn more about the pieces of your digital marketing that are and are not working, you’ve gotta have attribution tools. This will enable you to spend time, energy, and money on the things that are working and to stop wasting effort and expense on the stuff that isn’t serving you well.

Good digital marketing attribution tools will help you to know exactly which path customers took to get to you, what they do once they find you, and which piece of your puzzle makes them return again and again. You should also be able to see the data from each advertising avenue you’re utilizing in a way that allows you to compare the performance.

Soo …

Which Digital Marketing Attribution Strategy Will Work for You?

I’m not going to tell you what to do. None of these attribution models are horrible. None of them are perfect. Each one of them can give you a different perspective on the behavior of your customers and help to improve your marketing ROI.

You need to know your business strategy first. If you know your business strategy, then you should be able to choose which digital marketing attribution model is best suited to that strategy.

These questions will serve to point you in the right direction …

Are you finding that your users are taking a longer path to get to you from start until a purchase and that to get them there every little piece of interaction is crucial? If that’s you, then take a closer look at the time-decay and/or linear models.

Are you gearing all of your digital marketing efforts toward brand awareness and customer acquisition? If this describes your current strategy, then you probably want to use the first-click model to analyze all of your data.

Are you finding that once a user has been exposed to your brand that they never make it past the potential customer point to actually making a purchase? If you find yourself with this issue, then you may want to consider the last-click model.

Here’s the deal. Once you figure out which of these digital marketing attribution tools you’re going to use, don’t hop around from tool to tool. Commit. Otherwise, you cannot actually measure the performance over time in order to figure out how well things are working.

Don’t be afraid to get evaluations and feedback from actual customers. Automated tools can only give you so much information. Nothing can replace the feedback you get from people who are physically moving through the journey you’ve laid out before them.

Sooo …

Digital Marketing Attribution is not rocket science, okay? You’re going to take a good hard look at every avenue you are digitally marketing to potential customers. That means emails you are sending, social media posts on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and ads running in any or all of those channels. Any type of clickbait you’ve set up can all be considered part of your digital marketing strategy.

You want every person who comes in contact with the pieces of your strategy to be interested enough to engage and click away until they reach their final digital destination and agree to make a purchase. That’s what you want. You want your strategy to work.

But you need to know which one of your strategies is a waste of money and which ones are enjoyable for the customers so much so that they continue engaging until you see an actual return on the investment of your time, energy, and funds. And this is why knowing your digital marketing attribution matters.

In the case of digital marketing attribution, the journey is as important as arriving at the destination. You want to set people on a fruitful path to the destination you have set up in advance, right? Yes, people, yes.

If your tools suck, then you’re setting yourself up to fail. And if you’re not failing yet, you will. Period. Stagnation is failing because you will ultimately die out. Don’t do that. Get tools that work.

Look. You probably already know that I am the CEO of Hyros. Hyros is going to be hands down the best tool you’ll find to track what you’re doing. Seriously. That’s not me hyping it up, that’s a fact.

We guarantee you a fifteen to twenty percent improvement in your ad performance when you use Hyros. And if that doesn’t happen for you, guess what? We will give you every penny back. That’s right. We won’t keep a dime.

So, use it. It is zero risk to you. You have everything to gain by using Hyros and absolutely nothing to lose. Do the math. That is a pretty fantastic advantage you’re giving yourself.

Now, if you want to learn more about digital marketing attribution, how it works, and why it’s important, book a call with me. I will jump on a call and chat with you about all the things. I will even take a look at what you have going on and give you feedback.

I want you to succeed, and I truly believe the best way to do that is by letting me help you. Of course, I’m going to suggest that you try Hyros. That’s just a given because it’s the best. And because I know you’ll thank me for it later.

Please. Don’t waste your time with tools that don’t work. I have so much free content on my YouTube channel to help you make better decisions and have a better business. So, get on YouTube, listen to my most woke videos, watch me in my peaceful poncho, and learn some really great stuff.

I’m here for jokes all day, folks.

Alright, that’s it. This has been Alex Becker. Thanks for stopping by. Have a good one.

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