Marketing attribution

Marketing attribution is working out which advertisement, post, email or campaign led a person to buy something, and giving each one its share of the credit. A company that spends on many kinds of marketing needs to know which of them actually bring customers, so that it can spend more on those and less on the rest.

Here is how it works in general. Each ad or link carries a code that identifies it. When a person clicks, the code is recorded, by a cookie in the browser, a tag in the link or a record in an app. If the person later buys, the purchase is joined to the clicks and views that came before it. This sequence is called the customer's path. A rule then divides the credit for the sale. Last-click attribution gives all the credit to the final ad before the purchase. First-click attribution gives it all to the first ad. Multi-touch attribution divides it among every ad on the path, either equally or with more weight for the most recent ones. Data-driven models use statistics to estimate each ad's real share.

Attribution is harder than it sounds. One person may see an ad on a phone and buy on a laptop. Browsers now block much of the tracking that joined those steps, through limits on third-party cookies. And an ad may get credit for a sale that would have happened anyway.

Take, for example, a fitness creator who shares a link to a protein powder. Through affiliate links for creators, each sale made through that link is credited to the creator, who earns a commission on it.

Consider a food delivery app that runs ads on twenty ad networks to win new users. A mobile measurement partner (MMP) records which ad each new user came from when they installed the app, so the app maker pays only the networks that brought real users.

Say a cybersecurity software maker closes a ₹40 lakh deal with a bank after a webinar, three emails and a sales call. B2B pipeline attribution traces the deal back to each of these, so the marketing team can show its share of the sale.

How is attribution different from marketing mix modelling (MMM)? Attribution follows individual people from the ad to the sale. MMM does not follow anyone. It compares total spending and total sales over months, by region and by channel, and estimates what each channel added. As tracking people becomes harder, many companies now use both.