The importance of eCommerce Attribution
Online stores are becoming more and more popular and due to their efficiency and convenience, today’s shoppers have become far more than one dimensional, as they constantly encounter new online experiences and platforms.
Thus, given the cross-channel nature of today’s consumer, ecommerce store owners are urged to consider the amount of money being spent in the digital space and ask themselves the following questions:
“What value do my marketing channels and campaigns have?”
“Am I spending my money wisely?”
“What channel of attribution is the most effective?”
“Am I retaining my customers?”
“Who is my main target audience?”
“At which touchpoint did the lead convert?”
“Which source actually lead to the conversions?”
Answering these questions is equally important, and the only way to do so is to understand that the eCommerce Attribution Model is more than Google’s “Default Channels” or “Source/Medium”.
Understanding the most common eCommerce Attribution models
First Click Attribution
The goal is attributed to the first interaction. For example, if a user’s website visit was prompted by a Facebook Ad, then they visited your website again via Google Search, the conversion is attributed to the Facebook Ad.
Last Click Attribution
In The last interaction model the goal is attributed to the marketing channel that brought the customer to your website during the last session of their journey. This is the most common and unfortunately the most inaccurate. Since it awards credit to the last interaction, it disqualifies any effort put into previous interactions such as social media, emails etc – it has a somewhat ‘incomplete nature’. 2
Linear Attribution
Attributed to all channels involved prior to the purchase. This model distributes credit to every interaction that prompted the call to action and the conversion.
Last Non-Direct Click
This is the standard model used by Google Analytics. 100% of the credit is attributed to the last clicked channel within the user’s journey. However this does exclude any direct channels, but also undervalues any previous interactions and awareness that may have prompted the direct sales.
Time Decay Attribution
This attributes a small amount of credit to each touchpoint, however, the closer the interaction is to the actual sale, the more credit it is awarded.
“Thinking about ecommerce attribution is simply attempting to add granularity to your marketing analytics and to spend money and time more wisely.”2
Effective Tracking
Using an effective campaign builder and creating a correct UTM (Urchin Tracking Module), is the most important part of the overall process. Should a campaign or ad not be tracked correctly, the user’s entire journey goes ‘undocumented’. Therefore all forms of interaction including calls, emails, chatbots, whatsapp messages, social ads, google ads, email signatures (and even non-digital media), should be tracked in order to effectively analyse the channels that may have prompted the interaction or conversion.
This helps the owner, or agency, to make better decisions when deciding where to invest more money, based on which channel is more effective.
How does this affect ROI Tracking?
Since the provided data enables the owner to track which platforms perform better than others, they are able to allocate budget to the high performing platforms that work best and therefore save time and money that may have been wasted on non-performing platforms.
Integrating Google Analytics with CRM
Although Google Analytics assists in measuring the effectiveness of your inbound website marketing campaigns, a CRM platform stores data of your consumer’s offline activity. This is done by capturing the data collected emails, sms’s, social messages, whatsapps, skype and phone calls creating an attribution beyond the ecommerce store. An effective CRM provides you with information including sale stage processes, hot/warm or cold leads, lead income, user loyalty, surveys and customer retention. This information, combined with Google Analytics data, forms a powerful remarketing tool. 6
Therefore, with the use of eCommerce Attribution Models, you are able to understand user’s journey as a whole and get a better understanding of which model will work best for your organisation. This allows you to allocate the necessary amount of money to the correct platforms and therefore save costs, increase revenue, generate new business and increase consumer retention and satisfaction.
We’ll be posting our next blog on how we use Bitrix24 CRM to measure offline attribution.
Keep an eye out!
