Marketing attribution: what is it, and how do you use it?

Marketing attribution isn’t just about tracking the customer journey. Or at least it shouldn’t be. Its whole purpose is to convert findings into actionable insights to drive growth—and that involves communicating attribution insights to leadership.

At its core, marketing attribution connects the dots between customer touchpoints and conversions. It’s not just about knowing what worked but understanding why it worked so you can optimize campaigns, allocate budgets wisely, and prove marketing’s impact.

In this article, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about marketing attribution

What’s marketing attribution?

Marketing attribution is the process of identifying which marketing activities contribute to conversions and business outcomes. It connects specific touchpoints—like ad clicks, email opens, or website visits—to the customer journey, helping marketers understand what’s driving results.

B2B attribution tends to suffer from long and complex sales cycles, and often, attributing success solely to the first or last click depicts only a part of the path to conversion. In addition, incrementality testing has shown that click-based attribution might overestimate ads’ influence, leading to a further need for accuracy in attribution models.

Attribution isn’t just about tracking performance; it’s about interpreting data to reflect the true value of your marketing efforts. Here’s why it matters:

• Connecting marketing efforts to business outcomes: Attribution helps you see how specific marketing activities drive conversions, whether it's an ad click, an email open, or an organic search visit. It allows you to link your strategies directly to the results that matter.
• Proving ROI to stakeholders: Marketing budgets are often under scrutiny, and you need solid data to demonstrate the impact of your campaigns. Attribution helps you present concrete evidence to stakeholders, showing where the money is being well spent and where adjustments are needed.
• Optimizing budget allocation across channels: With multiple channels in play, knowing which delivers the highest ROI allows you to make smarter decisions about where to allocate your marketing budget. Attribution reveals which channels should be focused on and invested in more.

Different types of marketing attribution

Here is an overview of standard attribution models, including first-click and last-click, which tend to be the most useful because you can implement them without advanced mathematical expertise.

First-click attribution

First-click attributes all the credit to the initial interaction that led to a conversion. Doing so provides insight into the channels introducing customers to a product or service. However, similar to last-click attribution, it overlooks the influence of in-between touchpoints.

Last-click attribution

This common approach assigns full credit for a conversion to the customer’s last interaction with a marketing channel before purchasing. While it is straightforward, last-click attribution fails to consider the customer’s entire conversion journey, often undervaluing the impact of other touchpoints.

Linear attribution

Linear attribution distributes credit equally across all touchpoints in a customer’s journey, providing a more holistic view of the conversion path. This approach is less used due to its complexity. It offers a balanced perspective but may not accurately reflect the varying impact of different channels on customer behavior.

Time-decay

Time-decay attribution acknowledges that interactions closer to the time of purchase often have a more significant impact. It assigns increasing weight to touchpoints as the customer nears conversion. While this accounts for the recency effect, it might underestimate the importance of earlier touchpoints.

Data-driven models

Algorithmic attribution utilizes machine learning (ML) and statistical models to assign credit to different touchpoints based on their influence on conversions. This approach offers a sophisticated understanding of cross-channel contribution by dynamically considering various factors, such as channel interactions, timing, and customer behavior.

To read more about the impact of statistical marketing, check out our marketing mix modeling vs. attribution guide.

Challenges with marketing attribution and how to overcome them

When you're on the path to discovering how marketing attribution contributes to marketing revenue, you may encounter some challenges, such as:

Siloed data

Marketers often struggle with having their data spread across different platforms (Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, CRM systems, etc), making it harder to put together a unified attribution report.

Here’s what to do:

As a solution, you can use Supermetrics, a tool that takes data from all your marketing platforms and puts that data in one place. Supermetrics has a “Join” and a “ Union” function. For example, with paid social, you can take all of your paid social data and stack it on top of your Google Analytics data to determine your first-click attribution model. By joining the data together, you get an idea of when people are coming to your website and what they are doing on Facebook before they land on your website. This insight gives you a high-level picture of what’s going on between your platforms.

In other instances, a lot of platforms allow scheduling reports. So, you can set up scheduled reports and make sure they feed into a dashboard. For example, you can schedule a Facebook report and GA4 report and then use Looker Studio to blend these data sources.

Combining online and offline data

The sheer complexity of customer journeys scattered across many touchpoints on different channels (email, social media, paid search, organic search, etc.) makes it challenging to attribute conversions accurately. This is especially hard when offline and online interactions are involved.

Here’s what to do:

Successful implementation of cross-channel attribution is about measuring the right metrics. Key performance indicators (KPIs) can include:

• Conversion rates: Understanding the conversion rates associated with different channels can highlight their effectiveness.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Analyzing how much it costs to acquire customers through different channels can drive budgeting decisions.
• ROI: Measuring ROI on a channel-by-channel basis enables optimized resource allocation.

If a particular channel shows a high CAC but low conversion rates, it may be time to reconsider the approach or pivot to more cost-effective channels.

Measure top-of-funnel and brand activities

Sometimes, marketers have a tough time proving the value of top-of-funnel (TOFU) channels and activities such as content marketing, social media, and brand awareness campaigns. TOFU metrics are difficult to attribute to conversions, as their impact might not appear directly in last-click models.

Here’s what to do:

To highlight the value of awareness campaigns, you should use a tool like Supermetrics to tell a story with your data and works your way down to the attribution piece. TOFU campaigns are important because if you don’t have new people discovering your product, then you won’t have any more people to convert and expand brand awareness.

Measuring metrics such as cost per impression, cost per reach, and cost per click can tell a story behind the audience on the platform, and in theory, if the content is finding the right people, these metrics should start to decrease.

Budget constraints for SMBs

No matter your attribution model, you need technical expertise to understand how data links together without causing duplicates or data errors.

Here’s what to do:

Due to budget constraints, small and mid-market businesses can benefit from simpler models, such as first-click or last-click, requiring the least amount of technical background for understanding marketing attribution.

4 tips for making the most of your marketing attribution

At Supermetrics, we’ve helped over 200,000 marketers with their data problems and reduced their reporting time by up to 50%. Here are a few of our top tips for marketing attribution.

1. Integrating and centralizing data

Unifying and centralizing data in one platform is critical to understanding the holistic view of your marketing performance. Because some platforms don't provide as much data, connecting as many platforms as possible is important to ensure you're getting the whole picture.

It's important to incorporate things like emails, CRM, etc. Then, you can start understanding the need for the product, which can tell you about the messaging to use.

2. Leveraging budget-friendly tools

Marketers are under growing pressure to “do more with less.” If your company or clients are cutting costs, then investment in marketing attribution becomes especially justified.

For b2b marketing measurement, you need a platform with an easy-to-customize dashboard and marketing reporting to visualize data and interpret data-driven insights without spending much money or requiring mathematical expertise.

3. Adopting multi-touch and hybrid models

Single-touch attribution assigns all credit for a sale or a conversion to a single touchpoint in the customer journey, typically the first or last interaction. Multi-touch attribution assigns credit to multiple touchpoints along the customer journey, providing insights into the effectiveness of various marketing channels.

A hybrid model combines multi-touch and last-click attribution models to understand the role of different marketing channels. By adopting multi-touch and hybrid models, you can go beyond the limitations of traditional attribution models for marketing measurement.

4. Tracking and measuring accurately

Not all platforms are created equal when measuring marketing attribution. For example, in the API, GA4 can’t get user IDs, which you would need to do to get the more in-depth attribution models. Therefore, you don’t have the data that you’d want to get to track individual actions. To simplify tracking and measuring data, you can use Supermetrics to collect data from all your data sources in just a few clicks for accurate data storytelling.

Adapting to the privacy-first landscape

With third-party cookies declining and the industry moving toward privacy-first measurement, you may wonder if marketing attribution is still relevant and how to adapt your model to reflect these changes. If you want more insight into this industry shift, check out our podcast, “Marketing attribution in a privacy-first world”.

When Google announced the Privacy Sandbox in 2020, the writing was on the wall for third-party cookies. To protect user privacy, third-party cookies are being phased out, and the industry is moving toward different tactics. Third-party cookies can be used to track users across the web without their knowledge or consent. For example, if you visit an outdoor store website and click on a tent but don’t end up buying the tent, you may see ads for this tent on other websites you visit.

This privacy shift emphasizes the importance of accurate tracking and how to set it up correctly on your website. For example, instead of relying on third-party data, you can use zero-party data collected directly from your audience through quizzes, surveys, and polls. Ensuring proper tracking means your attribution data is reliable, leading to better decision-making and confidence in your insights.

With these privacy changes, you must ensure your attribution remains intact while respecting user privacy. First-party data is more valuable than ever as the natural alternative in a post-cookie world. It can target specific audiences and track conversions with the user’s consent. Users might even avoid your website entirely if they know you use third-party cookies.

On the other hand, users are more likely to trust you with their data if they know it is being used to improve their experience on your website. In turn, you can use that data to enhance your attribution model and messaging for privacy-conscious customers.

Tips to communicate insights to your stakeholders

You may face skepticism from leadership or clients about the accuracy of attribution models and reports, especially when findings challenge conventional wisdom (e.g., TOFU activities that don’t deliver immediate results). In that situation, it is important to keep the main objectives at the forefront of your mind — there’s a ton of data that you could show, but stakeholders mainly care about where the money is going and the results that come from your budget.

Focus on data storytelling. For example, if you can say people are watching this video, then they tend to land on this page —that's a story the data can tell.

You need to use data to advocate and give specific examples reporting to stakeholders. For example, you can say things like, “ We should try A/B testing ads with this color” or “We should try to use more ads with this messaging.” Instead of just saying impressions have increased, you can say impressions continue to increase, and the cost keeps decreasing because of this particular ad. This approach allows you to tell the whole story with the data instead of focusing on one thing at a time.

By looking at the bigger picture, which is what stakeholders value, you can make recommendations based on attribution. When those recommendations start to work and stakeholders see the value of attribution, the level of attribution could continue to grow in the business.

Final thoughts

When you make data-driven marketing decisions, you can improve your marketing and grow your business. Marketing attribution is part of that decision framework, which tracks the customer journey to determine which touchpoints trigger a conversion.

Marketing attribution is an ongoing process of experimentation and adaptation. As privacy laws change and customer behaviors shift, refine your approach to attribution as you go.