What is data-driven attribution and how does it work? In this article, Data-Driven Attribution Modelling Importance In Conversion, I’ll show you exactly what a data-driven attribution model is, why you should utilize it, and how your business can become more profitable. 

 

Watch the video version of this article below:

What is data- driven attribution modelling and how it works in Google Ads?

 

When it comes to Internet marketing, you want to be sure where your customers find you, so you ask them this question: “How did you find us?”  

However, we found out that a customer’s answer to this question is 89% inaccurate because of the multiple searches that happen from different devices.

For example, there is now an average of 37 searches done online for a travel purchase, and 139 searches for a car purchase.   

About 74% of consumers will use different devices. With all those searches how do you really know what marketing channel is working and how much credit each should have?

This is where you need to know your data-attribution modelling or simply means, how you credit sales and conversions based on the touchpoints of your conversion paths. 

In Google Ads, the default attribution model setting is the last click. This means that the default conversion tracking is set to last click. This does not tell the whole story of how your customers find your website.  

With the last click attribution, this simply means that the click gives 100% of the credit to the last click action that your customer did to get to your website. If someone took 5 different visits to get to you, that last click doesn’t tell the whole story.   

The last-click attribution is useful when you don’t need a lot of data to know where your customers are coming from. This is most useful for industries like emergency services such as plumbing or emergency veterinary clinics, where one click is the last click.

However, for multi clicks, how do you decide how much credit to give? That’s where learning the data-attribution model comes into place. This will help you understand the entire customer journey in how they got to you. 

Did you know that 31% of Google Ads managers are NOT using attribution? By learning data-attribution, you get a better picture of how your marketing channels all work together, you get a better budget allocation, and you understand your customer journey better and what got them to your website.

For example, Jane finds your website on Google Ads while on her lunch break, browsing on her mobile phone. 

Later that day, she’s on her office computer and goes back to your website to look a little further. 

Then 3 days later on the weekend, she has more time and she searches for you organically and goes back to your website to search further. 

Finally, on a Sunday night, she’s in her bed browsing her phone and sees one of your remarketing banner ads pop up. She clicks on that banner ad and goes back to your site and buys from you.    

See her purchasing journey? That’s a lot of complexity in multiple days, multiple devices, multiple locations, and multiple marketing channels that all worked together to get you that purchase.  

Your data-driven attribution model is the glue that tracks every one of those touchpoints and its machine learning understands the role each marketing channel played and assigns a value to each touchpoint intuitively and automatically.   

But how do you set-up the right data-attribution model? Continue reading below.

 

Setting up data-attribution in Google Ads

To change to a data-driven attribution Google Ads strategy, go to your Google Ads manager account. Go to tools> conversions> and change the conversion model:

 

 

 

Select data-driven attribution so that you can let Google’s machine learning work for you. 

TIP:

If you have ads that are paused because they weren’t getting results, you might try to un-pause them and optimize them for data-driven attribution to see if you get better results.

 

My thoughts

The data-driven attribution modelling can be optional for others. However, no matter how large or small your company is, the data-driven attribution model can be a very useful tool when it comes to how much value you see in data. It answers important marketing and business questions like which channels contribute more when it comes conversions, do all my campaigns contribute ROI, which referral sites are important to the user journey, and what happens if the PPC budget is reduced? 

All of these questions and more can help you improve your ads campaign, which in turn benefits your business in terms of ads budgeting and ROI.