Its one thing to know how youre doing against your metrics.
Thats why, at Zapier, we use attribution to understand how customer actions result in certain business outcomes.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
Im going to focus on three attribution methods here: first-touch, last-touch, and linear.
There are plenty of others to choose from, but these are a great place to start.
Did they first land on a blog post on your website?
Did they choose a paid ad?
Did they find your homepage from search?
Of course, this is a customers first trackable exposure to your brand.
It was during that last interaction (visiting the site directly) that they signed up.
When to use first-touch attribution
First-touch attribution will tell you how someone learned about your brand.
That means its great at telling you how well your top-of-funnel campaigns and efforts are doing.
Direct visits are ones that dont have a clear source outside of your website.
Thats a good thing.
To enable this kind of analysis, we look at our attribution data without the last direct touches.
This means eliminating all the events after the last non-direct visit.
In the example above, the last-touch credit would now be given to an ad.
Its the most common attribution method, and its simple:a person clicked this ad and signed up.
Just keep in mind that it will underrepresent top-of-funnel campaigns.
Thats where linear attribution (a form of multi-touch attribution) comes in.
In other words, every interaction contributes1/number_of_interactionsto the conversion.
But thats an oversimplification and misapplication of multi-touch attribution.
As they say, all models are wrong, but some are useful.
At Zapier, we are always trying to do whats best for our customers.
If you have strong building blocks of data and flexible modeling, youll be able to do the same.
This article by Lukas Toma was originally published on theZapier blogand is republished here with permission.
you’re able to read the original articlehere.
Story byLukas Toma
Lukas is a Data Manager at Zapier who lives in Innsbruck, Austria.
He likes to write about data and visual storytelling.
He likes to write about data and visual storytelling.
If he is not writing, he is likely out on a run.
