Allocation / Attribution is a largely futile effort. We simply cannot get in the mind of the customer, can we?
We can test. Testing works really well in the direct marketing world, but testing for attribution purposes works less well in the online marketing world.
So here's what you can try ... I've had success with this.
- Create what I would call "combinations". When a customer visits your site on March 3 via paid search, and purchases on March 5 via an e-mail campaign, you create a "combination" that captures the first touch and the last touch. In this case, the combination is "PAID SEARCH / E-MAIL".
- If the customer only had one visit (say from an affiliate marketer), then the combination is "AFFILIATE ONLY".
- The pundits will jump in and suggest that we're missing everything that happens in-between first touch and last touch. Let them jump in and argue.
- Pay CLOSE ATTENTION to what happens on the next purchase. What are the combinations that are most likely to happen NEXT? Does "PAID SEARCH / E-MAIL" lead to "E-MAIL / PAID SEARCH"? Or does it lead to "PAID SEARCH / E-MAIL"? Or does it lead to "ORGANIC ONLY"? The mega-metric to calculate is the percentage of folks who migrate to different combinations in the future.
Once you identify the channels that drive orders, you begin to understand how you might attribute orders to ad channels better --- and you'll make better investment decisions.
The combinations help you see how customers migrate over time ... helping you figure out "what to do next" as opposed to helping you figure out "what just happened". Ultimately, you'll plug the most popular combinations into a Multichannel Forensics simulation, and you'll see what is about to happen to the future trajectory of your business.