Building A Facebook Ads Attribution Model That Works
What’s up? It’s Alex Becker of Hyros. Raise your hand if you want a Facebook ads attribution model that actually works? If that’s you, let’s do this.
Okay. So there’s a difference between having a Facebook ads attribution model and having a Facebook ads attribution model that will work for you. Who wants to invest in stuff that never even works?!
Here’s a good example. Let’s say …
You need a new printer. The one you’ve had for five years is on its last leg, and you work from home, so it’s pretty much a necessity. You’re on your way to Sam’s Club, so you’ll just check out their inventory. No big deal.
Sam’s has a decent selection of printers. Picking one out is easy. You grab your printer and some extra ink cartridges and take them to the checkout. No problem.
After you get home you unbox it and pull out the setup instructions. Again, no big deal because you have set up a printer before. You can read and follow directions, so that’s exactly what you do.
Three hours later, your wireless printer will not print wirelessly. The next day, you walk through the whole process again, making sure you didn’t miss a step. The same freaking thing happens. So, you try customer support. No dice. Then you phone a friend. No dice.
Two weeks later, you have managed to print two pages once, and you are unable to repeat the process. It won’t stay connected to the WiFi. You’ve even hardwired it straight to the router. Nothing works.
So, you find a printer cable that will connect it straight to your laptop. Hardwiring is the only way you can get your wireless printer to work. Awesome. The stupid printer works, but not how it’s supposed to work. It’s not doing everything it should be doing to help you do your job.
You want to build an ads attribution model for Facebook that will work … otherwise, it’s pretty pointless.
So, let’s talk about ad attribution models.
What Are Ads Attribution Models?
Well, I’m glad you asked. Attribution models establish the way credit is designated to each touchpoint throughout the conversion process. Attribution windows are used to indicate which touchpoints the attribution model is supposed to focus on.
Attribution models can be founded on a statistical model or different rules. Statistical models use historical data to direct credit. Rule-based models allow you to choose rules to determine the way that conversions should be assigned to the various touchpoints. Single-touch models give credit to just one touchpoint. And multi-touch models enable you to give credit to multiple touchpoints along the user’s journey to conversion.
Requirements for Building a Facebook Attribution Model
Be Certain To Take The Following Actions Before Using The Facebook Attribution Model Tool:
Set up a Business Manager account. This will enable you to better manage your business.
Click on “Get Started” in the Facebook Attribution Dashboard.
Now you need to create a line of business.
After choosing your business type, sync the data from your data sources and your Ad accounts according to the on-screen directions. Be prepared to wait fifteen to twenty minutes at this point.
Time to move on to the steps to build your Facebook ads, and attribution model.
Steps to Build Your Facebook Attribution Model Tool
- Step 1: Choose Your Conversion
- Step 2: Choose Your Reporting Period
- Step 3: Choose Your Attribution Model and Attribution Window
Step 1: Choose Your Conversion
- First, look in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, and find the drop-down menu of conversion events.
- Next, click on the drop-down menu of those conversion events.
- Select the event you want to track.
- *If you need customized rules, then you’ll want to choose to Create a Custom Conversion.
Step 2: Choose Your Reporting Period
- First, look in the upper right-hand corner of the dashboard for reporting periods.
- Click on the drop-down menu of reporting periods.
- Select the date range you want.
- Find “update” and click on it.
Step 3: Choose Your Attribution Window and Attribution Model
- First, click on the drop-down menu with the Last-touch model.
- Look beneath the Attribution Model and choose the model you want.
- Under the Attribution window, choose the window you want.
- Choose “apply.”
- Now you can view reports.
A basic attribution model is used to figure out which touchpoints get credit for purchases along the conversion journey. To get more specific, Facebook Attribution Modeling is a tool for measuring the effectiveness of your advertising campaign.
Believe it or not, it doesn’t just measure on Facebook. It measures the entire conversion journey off of Facebook, as well. This way you can tell which ads affect users’ choices to pursue a purchase.
If you’re a marketer, then you will use the Facebook Attribution Modeling to gauge whether or not each ad in the campaign has been worth the investment or if it was a waste of time and money. Ultimately, it helps them make better marketing decisions to affect your business positively.
Facebook Attribution Model Reporting
To understand what you’re looking at when it comes to Facebook Attribution Model reporting, you have to understand it’s divided into three things: multi-device, performance, and custom reports.
Multi-device: This allows you to see how people are responding to your ad content over multiple devices.
Performance: This is the spot where you can get a look at the effect of your touchpoints in the various social spaces of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, etc.
Custom Reports: This is exactly what it sounds like. You can make customized reports to break down all of your data in the way that works best for you.
It’s crucial for you to know how well your Facebook ad campaigns are doing. The reports will tell you about the impact all those ads have on conversion. After you have assessed the impact, now you can:
- Keep the ads that are working well and ditch the ones that are flopping.
- Determine which paths to use for your target audience
- Quantify the value that each ad is bringing to your business
- Improve your ROI because you know where to use your ad spend to get the most bang for your buck.
The 4 Types of Facebook Attribution Models
Your ability to precisely measure the worth of your ads and strategy choices is directly affected by the Facebook Attribution Model you choose. There are four different choices that have about eight subcategories to consider when deciding on your Facebook Attribution Models.
4 Facebook Attribution Models:
Single-touch models give all of the conversion credit to exactly one touchpoint.
Multi-touch models give a percentage of credit to all the touchpoints in the user’s conversion journey, allowing you to figure out how each channel affects the sale.
Rules-based models are basically predetermined blueprints that assess each touchpoint that ends up in a conversion no matter the type of user or conversion.
Data-Driven Attribution models assess historical data using machine-learning algorithms to find out which touchpoints are expected to lead to conversions.
8 Subcategories of Facebook Attribution Models
- First-click Attribution Model
- First-touch Attribution Model
- Last-click Attribution Model
- Last-touch Attribution Model
- Data-driven Attribution Model
- Credit Attribution Model
- Positional Attribution Model
- Time Decay Attribution Model
First-click Attribution Model
The First-click Attribution Model allots all credit to the first click or visit that started the conversion journey. This particular model gives value to that first visit when the attribution is lengthy.
First-touch Attribution Model
The First-touch Attribution Model is the go-to choice when you are keeping track of the ad campaign that gets the credit for bringing the customer to you. This model assigns all the conversion credit to the first visit that brought about engagement.
Last-click Attribution Model
The Last-click Attribution Model assigns every bit of conversion credit to the last-clicked ad that a user interacted with before a purchase is made.
Last-touch Attribution Model
The Last-touch Attribution Model gives 100% of the credit for the conversion to the last visit that led to the customer’s purchase.
Data-driven Attribution Model
The Data-driven Attribution Model uses Machine Learning algorithms to examine pertinent patterns across historical data to give a portion of the credit to each touchpoint across Instagram, Messenger, Facebook, and Audience Network formulated on the successive influence of each touchpoint that led to conversion.
Credit Attribution Model
The Credit Attribution Model is a multi-touch model based on rules that allots an equal amount of credit to each touchpoint the customer engages with before a purchase happens. If you want a picture of the entire conversion journey, this model was built for that.
Positional Attribution Model
The Positional Attribution Model is a multi-touch model based on rules that give weighted credit for a purchase to the first and last touchpoints on the conversion journey, and all the remaining credit is shared equally across all other touchpoints.
Time Decay Attribution Model
The Time Decay Attribution Model gives more credit to touchpoints that happened closer in time to the conversion. It allows you to value the multiple touchpoints that contribute to conversion while giving the most recent touchpoints more credit.
How to Build a Custom Marketing Attribution Model in 3 Steps
#1 Gather Data
Group together the data on all the touchpoints, whether they are converting or not, and where the conversion occurred on the conversion path.
Capturing UTM tags
To identify the traffic sources the following parameters are used:
- utm_campaign: indicates the campaign that your URL is part of
- utm_source: indicates the channel that the traffic came through
- utm_medium: indicates the type of traffic
Capturing user-level data
Identifying user IDs and device IDs to then identify multiple devices for every user throughout the conversion path.
Capturing conversion and revenue data
This means gathering the data on conversions and revenue found in the CRM. This data allows you to calculate revenue, ROI, and conversions from each channel.
#2 Gather all of your data together
Import all the data and put it in one place.
#3 Choose an attribution window
An attribution window is the period of time when a purchase needs to be credited to a touchpoint inside that specific window.
Something else you’ll need to consider when building a solid attribution model is incorporating a lift test.
What Is a Lift Test?
A lift test is when you put together a random audience into a test group and have a control group, only showing ads to the test group. The difference in actual purchases between the random and control groups is known as lift. It shows the true impact of a channel’s ads on the audience.
When running ads on Facebook, it’s smart to run lift tests on a regular basis because there are so many impressions on this channel. Doing this helps you to properly regulate your attribution model.
Integrating Offline Activities into Your Attribution Model
Because people are not just seeing your products online, you must consider offline activities, as well. Offline activities include things like billboards and television ads. This is a good reason to take two like geographic areas and set them up as control and test groups in order to calculate the impact of an ad campaign or specific marketing strategy.
You can also try before-and-after tests. This type of test has you studying two time periods that are running different types of marketing.
Whatever you do, you will need to be sure that you run your tests for a minimum of one week. And do not run tests expecting to measure regular data on days like Cyber Monday or just before Christmas.
Building a Data-Driven Attribution Model
When you are building a data-driven attribution model, you basically have three options:
- An in-house build: This is a trustworthy attribution model that covers the modeling, tracking, and analysis of data throughout every single one of the customer touchpoints. To build this complicated attribution project you’ll need to allow for months of work, plan for immense development and analytics resources, and make an ongoing investment in tool development and maintenance.
- Depend on a combination of attribution solutions or tool-based analytics. You’ll need quite a lot of tweaking and jostling of data silos and the utilization of various tools to cover all of your attribution requirements and data sources.
- Carry out a complete marketing attribution tool. These types of solutions are meant to give you a comprehensive perspective of your marketing endeavors by grouping together each piece of data from every one of the data sources, changing it, and linking your leads and conversions with the correct sources.
So What?
Now that you have a head full of information regarding attribution models, you have enough details under your belt to know what it takes to build an attribution model for Facebook that works.
If you still need more help, check out my other blogs and YouTube videos. There is a ton of free expert information for you in every one of my videos.
And when you want the best ad-tracking software around, check out Hyros. Yes, I’m biased because I am the CEO … but it’s true. I’m so confident Hyros can help you get a better ROI that if you don’t see an improvement, you’ll get all of your money back. So, really, you have nothing to lose by trying Hyros for your ad tracker.
Alright, that’s it for today.
This is Alex Becker of Hyros. Thanks for reading. Have a good one.
HYROS TRACKING
If you are interested in obtaining the same stats I showed in this video and even having us help you set this up, GO HERE to get more information on HYROS.
Ad Training and Tactics
While I do not sell courses, I do offer a private coaching program where I train people on the ad strategies I have used to build multiple 8 figure and 7 figures businesses. You can get more details on that HERE.
HYROS Facebook Group
It’s really simple. This group is the best media buyer Facebook group online because we make sure that every member is spending significant ad spend before joining. It’s for veteran ad buyers only and because of that the networking/information being shared is on another level. You can apply to join HERE
Here Are Our FULL Zero To Scaled Ad Courses (Free)
The Zero To SCALED Facebook Ads Course (Advanced FB Scaling)
The Zero To SCALE Youtube Ads Course (Advanced YT Scaling)
Here Are Some Other Post You Will Enjoy
Using AI + Print Tracking Is The Ultimate Scaling Edge In 2020-2021
My Top 3 Highest Converting Youtube Ads Of All Time
The Highest Converting Ad Opt In Existence