What is attribution?

Taken on its own, the word attribution can of course mean ‘to give someone credit for doing something’. Roald Dahl can be attributed with writing George’s Marvellous Medicine; I can be attributed with creating that mess in the kitchen after reading George’s Marvellous Medicine.

The term marketing attribution is used in a very similar way.

What is marketing attribution?

Marketing attribution is the practice of determining the role that any given channel plays in informing and influencing the customer journey.

Basically, for any company to truly make any kind of informed decision for future strategy, it needs to understand the value of everything it does online.

There are so many ways that a customer can find your ecommerce site: organic results on a search engine, a PPC campaign, a link on Twitter, a retargeted display ad on another website…

Customer journeys are far from linear. They can happen across multiple platforms, devices and sessions.  

If you monitor all of your channels with regard to how each customer interacts with each one on their journey until they make a purchase, a percentage value can be attached to each channel. That way you can determine how important each channel was in the journey.

Unlike specific channel measurement, where the results can be very ‘black or white’, attribution relates every part of the journey in a subtly nuanced way. 

For instance, attribution can tell you how display ads can help paid search efforts, or how paid search affects SEO efforts, or how social and email can complement each other.

This is far more accurate than just attributing a sale to the last click and it can help businesses figure out which channels are the best for driving conversions and which either need further development or just aren’t worth the investment.

After all marketers don’t just want to justify their digital spend, they also want to optimise it.

Here are some further benefits of attribution as taken from our Valuing the customer journey report

Further reading for beginners…

During my first year at Econsultancy I’ve been making a point of writing beginner’s guides to any new terms or phrases I find particularly baffling, or that I might suspect other people may find baffling too. 

The following related articles should help clear up a few things:

Main image by Quentin Blake, courtesy of www.RoaldDahl.com

To learn more about marketing and all things digital come to our Festival of Marketing event in November. A two day celebration of the modern marketing industry, featuring speakers from brands including LEGO, Tesco, Barclays, FT.com and more.