As a marketeer you have to ask yourself:
What marketing channels have I activated?
How long normally will it take a customer to convert?
What actions do I value most from my marketing activities?
The key part at Navigator, as part of forming this relationship with you, is understanding your key goals and what you consider as important. Despite using standard tools such as Meta's pixel, Google Ads conversion tag and Google Analytics without knowing your key channels that you value we will always find discrepancies.
Our objectives are to understand your attribution models, challenge them and see how we can not only help demonstrate value in the advertising but also how we compliment sales incrementally through your other channels.
How can users convert
There are two key standard methods a user converts they are
Clickthrough
This is where the user clicks on the ad to the landing page, within a given period of time, the user converts (conducts the booking, purchase, submits the form)
Viewthrough
This is where the user views the ad (impression), critically does not click on the ad at this point, Within a given period of time that user organically searches for your website and conducts the booking. Because of cookies the conversion tags recognises the user that had seen the ad and converts.
Important: Analysing Clickthrough Vs Viewthrough
The biggest challenge is tracking viewthrough conversions to your analytics platform. Due to the nature of clickthrough conversions, this will track the user on your analytics as they have the designated UTMs activated. Now with viewthrough, cross device tracking is not applied, therefore if the user organically searches (after being influenced by the ad) for the website this will not be able to be traced in your analytics platform
With Facebook ads reporting due to issues surrounding privacy rules surrounding iOS14.5 if the ad set has been set as 7day click and 1 day viewthrough, Facebook cannot split the conversions by attribution window. As Navigator's reporting directly links to the Facebook API we therefore cannot split the conversions by window.
MultiTouch Attribution and Analytics
In this day and age, we want to understand exactly how each channel influences a user to conduct the final purchase. Whilst solutions are not perfect we can use website analytics platforms like Google Analytics to get a better understanding.
Whilst you have your attribution in place, at Navigator it is critical we understand your model as this influences how campaigns are set up and what you consider as success.
Here are the different types of attribution models that are more commonly known:
First touch/click
This assigns all the value of the conversion to the first interaction or touch point that the user encountered.
For example if a user first clicked on a Facebook campaign first then went on to click on a pay per click ad later and converts this would give all the credit of the conversion to the Facebook campaign.
Last touch/click
This assigns all the value of the conversion to the very last interaction or touch point that the user encountered.
Using the example previously, where the user first clicked on a Facebook campaign then on the pay per click this model would assign all value to the pay per click channel.
Time Decay
When viewing the time decay attribution model, you attribute credit based on the number of days the visit was before the conversion.
Linear
This assigns equal value of the conversion to each touch point or interaction the user encountered.
In the previous example this would assign 50/50 attribution to Facebook and pay per click.
Data Driven Attribution
Machine learning models collates data on all the different channels activated and using mathematical models to provide different weightings to each touch point
Challenges Today and Future of Attribution
With privacy blockers and tracking becoming more challenging due to iOS14.5 changes by Apple part of the issues with tracking is data from ads reporting is less granular and having a true view of marketing channels comes with challenges.
This includes verifying your domain, prioritising your Facebook pixel events to your domain and within Google Analytics understanding the issues with last click.
Commonly Google Analytics by default standardises attribution to last click, this solely gives value to the last channel but does not take into consideration the different channels that got to the final conversion.
It is why in the interim at Navigator we recommend using linear attribution if data driven is not in place.
Furthermore we recommend your Google Analytics platforms are converted into GA4 properties which uses data driven approaches. This will be the new standard from Google as standard analytics is deprecated.
*few more sentence with evidence on last click against data driven.
