138: Attribution is a bit of a myth

There’s this thing called “last-click attribution” where you assign a sale to … the last click.

If you think about your buying behavior, you’ll quickly realize that model probably only works for a very small percentage of your purchases, and that it gets less and less valuable as the price of the product increases.

A lot of touch points are required to sell a higher-priced product. The idea that you can attribute the sale to one particular touch point isn’t sensible.

As Michelle Tresemer says, in a YouTube video I’ll link below …

“Most of the time when I see marketing teams trying to get attribution it’s because someone above them is asking for something ridiculous.”
Michelle Tresemer from Foundations First.

Absolutely. The reality is that it takes many touch points to close a deal, and there’s no way to track them all. It’s simply impossible.

Marketers should be measured by revenue, and management shouldn’t be getting in their stuff about it.

However, marketers still need to make some decisions about where to invest their money. They can’t just throw up their hands, say “I don’t know what’s driving sales,” and spend on everything. Or on nothing. Or … and I’ve seen this … base it on what their kids are doing on social media. Don’t do that.

There are several different ways to view attribution, and some of them can give you hints about specific things. For example, first-touch attribution helps you understand how people are exposed to your brand in the first instance. Last-touch attribution might be helpful in measuring certain calls to action, the effectiveness of your landing page, or your store.

But all the interactions are having some effect, and it’s very hard to tease that out.

Unfortunately, the push towards “data-driven marketing” can have a tendency to simplify cause and effect, which can lead to erroneous conclusions and bad strategic decisions.

My advice is to look at the data, for sure, but to be skeptical about what you think it means. Pay attention to your own buying habits, and imagine what kinds of false conclusions the seller might be making about your own decision-making process.

Try multiple different types of models, but have some humility about it, and realize that “the data” might seem to say one thing, but when you act on that conclusion, you might not get the result you expect.

It’s a tough job!

Resources

The Myth of Modern Marketing Attribution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mtZC_Bjy-8

TikTok measurement head: industry needs weaning off ‘last-click attribution’

https://the-media-leader.com/tiktok-measurement-head-industry-needs-weaning-off-last-click-attribution/

What is Attribution Modeling? A Quick Explainer for Marketers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfnJwYuFWVM