Demystifying Attribution: Simplifying the Seemingly Complex

Grounded in the practical insights from years of experience, aims to equip marketers with the knowledge to demystify attribution for media buyers spending millions a year and in some cases, many millions a month, and apply these foundational technologies confidently and effectively.

Unraveling the Complexity of Attribution

For many marketers, attribution is the holy grail of marketing analytics, yet it often seems wrapped in a veil of complexity. It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the myriad models and technologies, each promising to be the key to unlocking your company’s full potential. However, the essence of attribution is rooted in just four fundamental technologies. This ebook will guide you through these technologies, showing how they form the backbone of all attribution systems and explaining how you can leverage them to simplify your marketing attribution effectively.

The Four Cornerstones of Attribution

Attribution doesn’t have to be complicated. It fundamentally revolves around four key technologies:

• Platform Pixels: These are small pieces of code placed on a website or within an ad to track user interactions. Platforms like Facebook and Google use pixels to monitor how users interact with ads, providing data on conversions and user behavior. This helps marketers understand which ads are performing well.
• Cookies: Cookies track users' browsing activities on a website. They are crucial for tracking user paths through a site, helping marketers see which pages and products draw interest and contribute to conversions.
• Tags: Including UTM parameters, tags are appended to URLs to track where website traffic comes from. They are less susceptible to privacy restrictions and provide granular data on traffic sources, making them invaluable for attribution.
• Statistical Attribution
  • Incrementality: This involves understanding the additional impact or 'lift' that marketing campaigns contribute over no advertising activity. It helps marketers measure the true effectiveness of specific campaigns beyond baseline activity.
  • Marketing Mix Modeling: This sophisticated approach uses statistical analyses to determine the effectiveness of different marketing tactics across various channels and strategize future marketing efforts based on past data.

Choosing the right technology from these four can depend on your specific needs and business size.

Starting Simple – Pixel Attribution

For most small to medium businesses, starting with platform pixels is advisable due to their simplicity and direct relation to ad performance as far as the platforms see/understand. This allows for automated optimization at the platform level. 

Here’s how to set them up:

1. Select a platform: Choose which platforms (e.g., Facebook, Google) are most relevant to your ads.
2. Implement the pixel: Follow the platform-specific guides to integrate the pixel on your website.
3. Monitor and optimize: Use the data collected by the pixel to see which ads lead to conversions and refine your strategy accordingly.

Enhancing Your Attribution Process with Tags

As your marketing strategies evolve, especially as you scale your spend and add more channels, enhancing your attribution model to include more detailed tracking becomes crucial. Tags, especially UTM parameters, are instrumental in this enhancement. They provide a deeper dive into the sources of traffic, enabling marketers to see exactly which campaigns, mediums, or sources are driving visitors.

When you move past 2-3 ad platforms, managing cross-channel campaigns is key to producing efficient results. The first step in this process is embracing a powerful tagging structure for every creative and ad variation you are distributing. 

Setting up UTMs properly can be a massive headache. Thankfully, technologies like Blueprint can automate the entire tagging process, as well as enhance your data gathering and analysis. By using such systems, marketers can set up tags that automatically feed data into an analytics platform. If the analytics platform is powerful, your first layer of analysis is conducted without manual intervention. 

Learn more about Blueprint

Through a powerful tagging structure, you will gain a big enhancement to your optimization process, because both you and a powerful Machine Learning engine can evaluate cross-channel campaign effectiveness. This will let you quickly make data-driven decisions based on user pathways and interactions highlighted by the tag data.

Tags work in conjunction with other analytics and CRM technologies such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Salesforce, and Hubspot. 

When to Consider Statistical Methods of Attribution

As your advertising reaches larger scales (hundreds of millions in media spend), you are confronted with new complexities. You should only consider adopting statistical methods of attribution when you find that your advertising efforts are reaching the limits of audience saturation—where additional ads no longer yield proportional returns, or the cost of reaching the same audience escalates due to high demand on advertising platforms. 

At this juncture, statistical methods of attribution become invaluable.

Types of Statistical Attribution

These advanced attribution methods enable companies to refine their advertising approaches meticulously, which carries a significant technical and resource burden. 

They should only be considered when your advertising has massively scaled, and is seemingly no longer efficient because all the other optimizations levers aren’t making a meaningful difference, generally an indication that the audience is saturated. 

Building a Comprehensive Attribution Strategy

Combining these technologies allows marketers to develop a comprehensive view of their marketing effectiveness. Here’s a quick guide to integrating these systems:

Start with pixels to get immediate insights into ad performance and allow the individual platforms to optimize effectively. 
Move toward a powerful tagging structure as you scale to understand broader user behavior, audience, content, and creative performance. This also allows you to perform cross-platform optimizations so you can efficiently scale your advertising. 
Gradually introduce statistical models to fine-tune your marketing efforts based on detailed data analyses when your cross-platform optimizations stall out due to audience saturation.

Simplifying Attribution Step-by-Step

Attribution doesn’t need to be a complex puzzle. By understanding and utilizing the basic building blocks of attribution technologies, you can streamline your approach, making it as simple or as detailed as your business requires. Start simple, and scale your attribution efforts as your marketing grows.