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1. Understanding Marketing Attribution
How the World Cup can surprisingly help us understand attribution
Are you looking to understand digital attribution? Well there is a great link between
the Football World Cup and attribution. Even if you aren't a football fan you'll want to
read this.
You might be thinking, I can’t think of any possible link between the World Cup and
marketing attribution, but you’d be entirely wrong.
What I want to cover here is a short metaphor for how to think about attribution. For
all those who are either new to the topic or those digital acquisition marketers who
are managing multi-channel media, this is a really useful concept to get your head
around.
Acquisition channels and particularly paid media, such as Display, Search, Social
and Affiliates, continue to expand. It seems like each year we introduce a new
channel or another sub-set. I can count about eleven different marketing channels
that a customer can be attributed to, and I’m sure other businesses can count in
excess to that. The most obvious difficulty with running so many channels, is the
most talked about marketing topic of the last few years – how do you attribute
conversions per channel? I often get asked to count the number of customers we
acquired through each of our eleven marketing channels and formulate a CPA for
each one. This is of course possible, but the results look extremely odd for at least
half of the channels. If I use last click attribution affiliates comes off great with
20-30% of my new customers coming through it, but Display performs awfully with
no conversions and a mighty CPA.
The problem of last click attribution has been discussed the world over, so a number
of other attribution models have become popular with marketers – first interaction,
time decay, linear, last non-direct click, position based and algorithmic. Weighted and
tailored attribution models are becoming firm favourites, but we still can’t all agree on
the right approach. Firms are now employing two or three models to compare
against and make optimisations with. But aren’t we just where we started? Running
multiple models still doesn’t answer the ultimate question of how each channel is
performing and which channel is attracting which customer.
This article isn’t going to even attempt answer that golden question, but I am going to
give you a simplistic approach that many of us can get our heads around – think of
your marketing channels as a football team; the eleven channels are equivalent to

2. the eleven players on the pitch. Let’s take the England first team and run that
alongside our marketing channels.
The marketing channels have purposely replaced Kane, Dier and Sterling for a
reason. Defensive players like Cahill, Stone and Walker have been replaced by our
top of funnel activity - Generic PPC, Display and VOD-Trueview. Why? Because let’s
face it they rarely score but we aren’t expecting them to. I think most of us will agree
these channels are about impressions and exposure on the most part, therefore we
shouldn’t expect them to convert. Gareth Southgate doesn’t necessarily encourage
Gary Cahill to score or even to assist, but he does expect him to supply stability, to
pass the ball out from the back, and provide a base for the attacking players to work
from.
The midfield is made up of Paid Social, Affiliates and Remarketing. Why? Because
these are much further down the funnel. On the most part they either assist a
conversion or actually make them. Lingard, Alli and Young are placed in the team
mainly to assist, though from time to time also score. Think of the Remarketing
channel as taking the ball from the top of funnel activity and leading it closer to the
opposition goal.
When it comes to our strikers and wingers, they are aimed much closer towards
conversion, they don’t work for branding or exposure, they are channels which are
aimed purely to assist or score. Organic and Refer-a-friend can certainly be
described as our Harry Kane’s or Sterling’s. Their conversion rates should be far
higher than other channels and they feed off of the work mainly done by the midfield
channels.
Why is this metaphor relevant? I found that thinking of our channel attribution in this
way combats the never-ending questions of why a CPA is extremely high for one
channel and not the other, or why conversions are far lower than another. We don’t
expect all channels to work equally, they are a team, with each operating in its own
function with its own aims. We can view them as singular channels of course, but we
should consider their own attributes based on what part they play in the team. A
defending channel should only really be judged on its tackling, blocking and heading
abilities – therefore it’s impressions delivered or brand impact. For our midfield we
want to see them creating clicks and driving traffic to our site, but we are less
concerned by actual conversions – just as we don’t mind if Alli doesn’t score, though
we want to see him creating chances and assisting our strikers. For an attacking
channel we are less concerned by impressions, in the same way Gareth Southgate
is less concerned by Harry Kane’s ability to defend, we are though looking at clicks,
conversions and CTR – just as we only really care if Kane scores plenty of goals.

3. Ultimately, what multi-channel acquisition marketers care most about is the team
winning. We care whether our blended CPA’s meet target and if we acquired enough
customers in June compared to target. If certain channels let us down this month, if
Alli and Young have a poor tournament, but the team actually bring home the World
Cup (we can all dream), then I can assure you Gareth Southgate will not be too
concerned if those two individuals don’t perform. It probably meant that Kane and
Sterling outperformed and make up for those less performing. In the same way your
Paid Content might not deliver enough impressions, your Remarketing or Email
might be converting at higher rate to normal - so as a whole you come out winning.
Sometimes as marketers we like to dive deep into topics and something reasonably
complex we do tend to make even more complicated. But in the same way we
shouldn’t get too bogged down with particular channel nuances, we should start to
look more holistically and use real examples to describe these complexities. Let’s all
start thinking of our attribution in a relatable way - it’s just like managing your very
own World Cup winning England football team!