What is attribution?

Attribution in e-commerce is the practice of ‘giving credit’ for a purchase or conversion. You can attribute purchases to any kind of marketing or sales activity that you and your team engage in. The underlying goal of attribution is to pinpoint which marketing activities, channels, campaigns or ads yield a desired return and make better-informed decisions on what to do next.

💡 Did you know that author Claude C. Hopkins already described an early form of attribution in his 1932 book ‘Scientific Advertising’ by way of handing out vouchers with unique coupons to track where customers came from?

Different types of attribution measurement

In e-commerce, there are two common types of attribution measurement; view-based measurement and click-based measurement. Each has it’s own pro’s and con’s, which we describe here:

View-based attribution measurement

Is applied in-platform by advertising channels like Meta, Google and Pinterest. Since interactions with ads happen within their platform, they have all the user- and usage data to be able to measure not just clicks, but also views and impressions of ads without interaction.

Pro’s

• Is able to leverage all available user- and usage data because it happens in-platform
• No concerns or legislations around privacy, as platform users have given full consent

Con’s

• Perspective is limited to in-platform behaviour
• Revenue attribution is done without considering other channels, causing over-attribution
• Attribution perspective is biased, as each platform has an interest to increase your spend

Click-based attribution measurement

Is mostly applied by teams or tools that read UTM paramaters from website links. For example: you might add “utm_source=Meta” to an ad you run on Meta, which is then being sent along when someone initiates a session on your website by clicking that Meta ad. Because this method measures from the website perspective, it enables you to measure across channels and create one, holistic overview.

Click-based attribution solutions, like Eyk, will often offer multi-touch measurement which allows you to track multiple clicks over time and connect them to a conversion. Based on your business and marketing strategy, you can then apply an attribution model of choice like first- or last touch, linear or U-shaped.

❓Want to know more about the different attribution models available in Eyk? Read: Different attribution models and how to use them

Pro’s

• Measuring from the website and therefore order perspective, not the channel, prevents over-attribution
• Attribution is done un-biased, there is no interest to increase spend in a specific channel

Con’s

• Misses user- and usage data that the advertising platforms have
• Challenges around privacy concerns and legislations need to be handled correctly

❗️Importance of first-party tracking for click-based attribution

When exploring an attribution setup outside the marketing channels, wether building one within your own team or leveraging a software product, it is important to investigate how tracking is being set up for you and assure your attribution runs on truly first-party tracking data, preferably running within your own Google Tag Manager and DNS settings. Here’s why:

Many solutions rely on third-party pixels, much like those of Meta- and Google Ads, to measure your traffic. Although these pixels might not yet be on the blacklists of ad blockers and can provide you with accurate tracking for now, they are still third-party implementations and will face increasing privacy regulations as well as an audience that will no longer accept them.

By making sure your attribution setup runs on your own server-side tracking setup within Google Tag Manager, you are able to activate one measurement setup for both attribution insight and for feeding back conversion data to your marketing channels. This creates a unified version of the truth and prevents confusion down the line.

How and when to use each for decision making

View-based attribution

While view-based, in-platform attribution has it’s limitations for providing strategic overview and comparing channel performance, it’s ability to take along all user- and usage data within the specific platform makes it powerful when optimizing ads and campaigns within that platform for maximum reach.

Click-based attribution

Click-based, un-biased attribution is very powerful when determining or finetuning your markering strategy, comparing channel performance relative to each other or analyzing actual Cost per Acquisition (CPA) and Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER). Additionally, when working with an attribution platform like Eyk, teams are often able to switch real-time between different attribution models. This allows for customer journey exploration, showing which channels and campaigns come up in different stages of the journey.

Note: because click-based attribution measurement relies on clicks only, it has known limitations around under-reporting top of the funnel and over-reporting bottom of the funnel channels.In branding and awareness campaigns, views or impressions play an important role in ‘filling the funnel’, but these are not measure by click-based attribution. In addition; between top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel, click-based attribution measurement tends to lose some amount of traffic due to cross-device browsing

Bringing it all together to boost marketing performance

E-commerce marketing teams that are able to leverage the power of both view-based and click-based attribution to drive their decisions, will be able to boost overall marketing performance and increase ROI for the business. This comes down to knowing your desired state of ratio’s and metrics, figuring out which attribution insights provide you with the deepest knowledge to base specific decision on and then adopting a process by which you are able to consistently turn those insights into performance optimizing decisions.

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