From Last-Click To Multi-Touch Models

Sergio Alvarez is a performance marketing expert, digital attribution leader and CEO and founder of Ai Media Group.

If you’re still measuring sales attribution based on the last place your customer clicked before converting, you’re missing out on valuable information. Attribution has evolved, and in a brave, new, data-driven world, a multi-touch model can be the key to deeply understanding your customer and replicating sales.

Last-Click Vs. Multi-Touch Attribution

The difference between last-click attribution and the multi-touch model is evident in their descriptions. The former attributes sales directly to the last platform your customer interacted with before converting. The latter takes into account every touchpoint they interacted with along the way.

Last-click attribution is a bit like having the navigation system in your car directing you to a place without telling you when to turn left or right. When you use last-click attribution, you’re hoping to replicate an action your customer took without having any idea what turns they took to get there, where they paused, and what turned them in the wrong direction. Looking at it in this way, it makes complete sense that this evolution in attribution has occurred.

We now have the capability to deeply understand our customer’s journey. Why would we remain fixated on their endpoint? For higher price point purchases, in particular, understanding the journey is vital because a consumer will almost never make such a purchase without a relatively extensive journey of research. If you don’t understand how they do that, how can you hope to insert yourself into their purchasing path?

The Challenges

Multi-touch attribution is a major development in the digital marketing space, but it has its challenges. To get the true benefit out of multi-touch attribution, you need to be able to follow an individual’s journey.

Of course, those very important data privacy laws now prevent many pieces of identifying information from being tracked online. Thankfully, you don’t actually need to know who the user is in order to obtain valuable insights from their data. You just need to know their online identity. As such, a necessity in correct multi-touch attribution is having access to unique identifiers for users that are still PII (personal identifiable information) compliant.

Another acknowledgment to make is that no form of attribution is ever going to consist of 100% accurate information all the time. One cannot track users on private browsers, for instance, but because multi-touch attribution gives you more information than last-click attribution, the end result is typically going to be more accurate.

In direct comparison, I’ve found that platform-specific ad data isn’t always accurate. Why would one platform give credit to another? Of course, each platform is going to say that all the digital traction came from their platform, and there were no other steps in-between. So if we’re looking at a continuum of accuracy, multi-touch attribution strategies are usually going to come out at the top of the curve.

Getting Started With Multi-Touch Attribution

If you aren’t already transitioning toward a multi-touch attribution strategy, I suggest you start immediately. Last-click attribution is not the way of the future, and it’s not the best way to level up your business.

One of the most important things to take into account when evolving to multi-touch attribution is that you need to ensure your entire team is working toward one overarching goal. Whether it’s an internal department or an outsourced agency, everyone working on your digital campaigns is going to have their own agenda.

Your brand team is in charge of extending your brand presence, for instance, while your lead generation team is responsible for expanding the top of the sales funnel. Those two agendas may well crossover at some point, and without multi-touch attribution and a single overarching goal to work toward, you may be paying two teams to do the same thing.

By being really clear on what that ultimate goal is, you can more easily identify the platforms and touchpoints that are feeding it. Then, rather than wasting your marketing budget by duplicating activities, you can actually funnel more money into what really is getting the results you want.

Although multi-touch attribution has really evolved due to an enhanced digital marketing space, the touchpoints you measure should not be solely digital in nature. I’ve noticed one of the most frequently forgotten pieces of data involves telephone calls made to your business by customers. This is very often the point at which a customer will be finally convinced to make a higher price point purchase, and yet, that sale will probably never be linked to all the preceding touchpoints the customer engaged with.

Similarly, any other form of in-person or offline contact with customers must inform part of your data collection strategy.

Evolution Or Revolution?

The movement from last-click to multi-touch attribution is not just a clever tactic for marketers. It’s really a game changer for businesses and consumers. I think the future of business is in relationships, and the deeper a brand knows their customer, the better that relationship will be. For the brand, that means more sales. For the consumers, it means that their needs will be better served, and the marketing they see will be more focused and useful.

In a world where information overload is a real risk, we can all do it with greater insights and fewer distractions.

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