Content tends to be dispersed over multiple channels in the digital age websites, social media, apps, and email thus a holistic approach is necessary. Understanding how different channels integrate into your overall marketing makes for better strategic changes, optimizations, and return on investment. Attribution increases as this knowledge sheds light on what factors steer customer response; subsequently, this fosters where resources should best be used for more effective marketing and more meaningful consumer engagement.
What Is Multi-Platform Content Attribution?
Multi-platform attribution assesses customer interactions across multiple digital touchpoints and reports realistically what each platform contributed to positive engagement, conversion, or sale. Attribution occurs via a handful of models that either give deference or disregard value to the platforms/platform touchpoints that ultimately occur. Proper attribution allows marketers to understand which channels work best, cut unnecessary spending on ineffective marketing, and enhance their digital content strategy by generating better content plans in the future based on user patterns of performance.
Why Is Attribution Important For Content Marketing?
Attribution is especially important for any marketer who wants to understand the customer journey. Thus, with attribution, a company can determine where and how users engaged with the company’s content, which helps to understand which platforms are best for generating awareness, consideration, and ultimately, conversion. The clearer the company understands what works where, the better budget allocation it can achieve, more refined messaging for increased ROI, and guaranteed effective marketing on platforms that respond to the call to action. Conversely, if a platform is not performing effectively, it won’t be realized until the end of a campaign. Attribution provides those red flags sooner rather than later with real data on performance.
The Most Common Attribution Models
The most common attribution models associated with multi-platform content distribution include first-click attribution where the first opportunity receives credit for interest; last-click attribution where only the final opportunity receives credit for conversion; and multi-touch attribution models including linear attribution, time-decay attribution, or position-based attribution, where fractional credit is given across all opportunities to acknowledge the support and conditioning impact each channel had throughout the customer journey.
Attribution With More Touch Points Provides More Insights
Multi-touch attribution gives marketers even MORE insights as it credits multiple interactions across platforms. For example, the linear model gives the same credit to all touchpoints, so marketers understand the impact of all platforms. Time-decay attribution gives more credit to the recent touchpoints, so marketers see which platforms attributed most towards conversion. Position-based attribution gives the most credit to the first and last touchpoints; thus, marketers will understand which platforms induced awareness and ultimately converted. With these assessments in place, more insights are garnered to determine how to better the content.
Issues Associated With Attribution Across Multiple Platforms
Attributing across multiple platforms presents issues such as fragmented data, limited tracking, and changes in data privacy policies. For example, fragmented data leads to lost opportunities to assess the customer journey, which may lead to misattribution. In addition, changes in privacy laws make it more difficult to track with cookies and third-party tracking. Thus, marketers must be sure they are leveraging first-party data and server-side tracking, as well as integrating activities that comply with policies to ensure effective attribution.
Tools that Help With Effective Attribution Management
Ideally, powerful analytics tools help manage attribution and guide decision-making about cross-platform interactions. For example, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or custom analytics can use API integrations to pull data cross-platform. These blended analytics serve as a hub for knowing where consolidated data exists, leading organizations to proper tracking, measurement, and attribution of credit across platforms.
Improved Personalization With Accurate Attribution
Multi Channel attribution increases personalized efforts because it emphasizes the personalized approach each individual experienced throughout their unique customer journey. Attribution provides marketers the means to understand what users engaged with, to what extent, and where; increased targeted options for personalized recommendations, messaging, and campaigns is the next step. The more an audience feels like they’re being catered to, the more a project will seem relevant and engagement initiatives will successfully fulfill ultimate conversion goals.
Attribution Helps Inform Content Optimization Efforts
Content optimization efforts are informed by the ongoing potential provided by attribution. Marketers understand what worked, when it worked; this allows for content optimization for future opportunities across platforms. Attribution analytics give good guidance on what kind of content works best where since it can be assessed over time, thus providing an opportunity for greater and more substantive strategic improvements in the future.
Unified Attribution Dashboard Simplifies Everything
A unified attribution dashboard simplifies everything. The aggregated assessment of many dashboards provides proper awareness of performance and metrics gathered through various marketing channels. Stakeholders understand what’s working, what’s not, and how to adjust joint efforts across the board for better attribution alignment once multichannel marketing efforts are evaluated through the same dashboard. It’s easier to communicate when everyone’s on the same page with access to informed data based on educated assessment across multiple platforms.
Budgeting Based On Attribution Insights
Attribution can empower marketers to budget more effectively with real performance across channels. Accurate attribution teaches brands which channels perform best so companies feel comfortable investing in those areas and down-funnel adjustment expectations for lower-performing channels. Budgeting based on attribution increases overall marketing ROI, improves content performance across the board, and extends a competitive advantage with channel access and compounding complexity.
Privacy Compliance When Using Attribution Tracking
Attribution systems must be privacy compliant. Companies must ensure their tracking is above board, their data collection efforts are transparent, and attribution systems are compliant with expected practices from GDPR to CCPA. The more above board systems are in terms of ethical data treatment, the more a consumer will trust it, the less risk a company will face, and attribution efforts will be sustainable with compliance instead of an emphasis on instant attribution results that disregard regulation and privacy.
Team Training for Attribution Accessibility
Companies stand to gain the most when training all employees to a level of understanding regarding multi-channel attribution. Training regarding data analytics, how to read attribution metrics and modeling, whether or not data-driven decisions can be made based on what is attributed, and privacy compliance ensures that all members of the marketing team have the proper tools and education necessary to excel. Empowered employees end up knowing how to better treat information and adjust content dissemination and campaign optimizations to the best of their abilities, with considerable quality improvements for performance and marketing success.
Predictive Analytics for Greater Attribution in the Future
Utilizing predictive analytics in the process of attribution will create powerful changes all in the name of attribution for the future. Predictive analytics take previous findings from attribution and customer engagement history and uses it to predict what users want in the future and how they will engage with it. By accessing predicted analytics, marketers can pivot their strategies for the anticipated engagement and distribution options, and accuracy only helps with the efficiency of campaigns and competitive advantage across platforms.
Attribution-Based Wins Are Reasons to Celebrate and Evolve
Wins that come as a result of effective use of attribution should be celebrated since it builds momentum moving forward. When attribution reveals which campaigns work best, which boost performance, and which ones have successfully used attribution to its advantage, there is a celebratory increase in motivation for recognition of effort in strategic investment and the ability to cultivate an ongoing culture of achievement through data-driven results. When successes are acknowledged, achievement breeds excitement, momentum, and attribution-based improvements of multi-platform content dissemination remain satisfying.
Attribution Helps Retain Customers After They’ve Converted in the First Place
Attribution can be a success measurement beyond just how well someone converts into a paying customer; it can help assess how to keep them. By measuring how often people engage via platforms post-conversion or purchase, marketers can see what aspects of content, and where they’re located, retain engagement and customer loyalty for the long haul. Then, using attribution through retention as a powerful tool, businesses can champion retention-based campaigns for better engagement with customer efforts or extended customer lifetime value.
How Attribution Should Relate To Business Goals
Attribution should relate to business goals by ensuring that whichever attribution considerations are undertaken now are in alignment with where the future goals lie. Organizations must ensure that they understand how the attribution information can provide value for business goals currently, whether it be brand awareness versus revenue versus customer acquisition. This will allow teams to better determine the proper attribution and analytics models down the line, as they’ll understand which insights from multi-platform measurement align best with more substantial business goals, resource allocation, and anticipated results.
The Future Of Multi-Platform Attribution With Privacy Regulations In Mind
The future of multi-platform attribution, with so many privacy regulations, will be with the same strategies that comply with privacy. Whether server-side tracking or integrating first-party data to do on-device assessments to trending attribution approaches. New innovations like anonymized cohort analysis and higher-level attribution models that keep things aggregated and not personally identifiable ensure companies don’t have to sacrifice precision for privacy compliance. Yet those who can embrace the new normals will have an advantage as their attribution can be based on trending expectations moving forward.
Conclusion: Maximizing Multi-Platform Impact Through Effective Attribution
Attribution correct and calculated across multiple platforms, purposefully disseminated with the ability to assess across multiple channels improves the effectiveness of marketing campaigns due to the awareness of how, where, when, and why a person is connected to the brand and how all points of contact help finalize purchase decisions. This awareness enables better organizational decision-making with attribution horizons that extend beyond what’s currently able to be assessed. For example, when accurate attribution calculations forecast where specific paths have worked historically with specific content across the company’s divisions, it helps assess certain expectations, potentialities, and recommendations moving forward.
With single-touch attribution and multi-touch attribution, companies are aware of what needs to be adjusted relative to a lost transaction or failed campaign. Analytics tools for attribution allow for a better understanding of trends. For example, attribution analytics tools assess from site to site so that information from YouTube can come through at the same time as Instagram and Facebook to assess trending up in similar or dissimilar directions. Real-time response attribution analytics assess those different trending movements while they are trending, not after the fact. Similarly, those analytics that predict are able to assess preferred actions for the future based on projected attribution.
Those companies that can manage their attributes and controlled attributions are more effective. Their need to spend less on failed endeavors goes with the direction of clearer pathways to success sooner rather than later. Budgeting becomes more appropriate based on what is achievable and what isn’t while resources become more dedicated and effectively utilized when there’s a proactive approach to what’s effective and ineffective moving forward. Such predictive capabilities attached to solid attributions also allow them to see what they can do to avoid failures in the first place. Inbound efforts become that much more successful when attribution links efforts across channels.
