Every business online wants to know what brought customers to their website or ad. Having an attribution model is probably the most important thing you need in place when you're trying to drive more customers to your site because you need to know what it costs to find them and what each order actually costs you. 

If you spent $100.00 to sell a single lipstick at $12.00, how will you know when that customer might buy another from you? What if they never do? Are there other products you sell that might be of interest? How did they discover your lipstick? You won't know this if you're not tracking your customer's interactions with your brand and attributing purchases back to what initially led the customer to your store. Knowing your customer's behavior can help you determine where to invest your marketing dollars and how much budget to allocate per channel before it becomes not worth it.

Building an attribution model that is comprehensive enough for digital teams with any level of experience to understand is more complicated than it looks. What most teams have today is a half-baked attribution system that requires exporting data from multiple tools into spreadsheets so that one or more people can spend hours massaging fragmented data that, in the end, no one has confidence in or trusts. 

When talking to digital marketers, some make it sound like having an accurate attribution model that everyone knows how to use and understands is hopeless and not something their teams can achieve for several reasons; lack of support, knowledge, budget, etc. 

Marketers using Google Analytics might build a dashboard that gets them part of the way, but who actually trusts Google? Google is too busy competing with Facebook for the biggest liar of the year award. It's incredible, Google and Facebook have the ability to report accurate data, but they will still take credit for every order, and not only that, they will confuse you further by adding another number to the end of it; 1 order becomes 13. At the end of the day, you're not any closer to knowing how many orders are real and where they really came from. 

A simple way to determine how customers found your site is by tracking the first and last place the customer clicked before placing an order. This is a common way that marketers attribute sales orders today. If you're using a Customer Data Platform, you can collect information about your customer and create a more advanced attribution model to help you make data-driven decisions. For example, a customer might see your ad or even a post on a social media platform but doesn't click, or perhaps they fill out a form asking "how did you hear about us," and the answer is different from the visitor's entry point. A customer data platform will track signals that can be used as indicators, so you can build sophisticated attribution models like linear or a time to decay. 

A linear attribution model is when each touchpoint in the conversion path shares equal credit for the sale. It is by far the easiest model to work with and does not ignore any media channel. The only setback is that it does not consider that various channels might exert varying degrees of influence on the prospects. A time-decay model attributes a percentage that indicates the effectiveness of each channel. The closer a channel is to conversion in the consumer's buying journey, the higher its weighting. This model will add to consumer loyalty because every stage of the buying journey is analyzed. 

A customer data platform like LayerFive lets organizations collect all their customer data and keep it in one place. We also help marketers make sense of it. Teams can measure the effectiveness of their efforts, attribute sales to the right media source, and see how much each channel contributed to the sale. And, it's all first-party data so you can optimize performance based on data you can verify and trust.

With LayerFive, you get accurate and high-quality data that fuels growth. You can enhance the customer journey, improve customer satisfaction, and drive personalization with custom offers. And increase sales and engagement. Contact us today to learn more about how your organization can benefit from using a customer data platform.