What is Multi-Touch Attribution?
Multi-touch attribution is a marketing technique that assigns proportionate credit to each customer interaction point, providing a complete view of a channel’s impact on sales. This approach gives a leg up to traditional rules-based methods like first- or last-touch attribution, which only credits the initial or final touchpoint before a conversion event.
These conventional methods can give inaccurate measurements of all touchpoints, leading to decisions based on biased data. Multi-touch attribution, however, eliminates bias by algorithmically distributing credit across all touchpoints based on their role in driving conversion.
There are three main types of Multi-Touch attribution models (see graphic):
- Even-Weighted (each touch gets equal value),
- U-Shaped (weights first and last touch higher)/ W-Shaped (weights first-touch, touch-prior-to-conversion, and touch prior to deal higher)
- Time Decay (touches near the beginning or end of the customer journey are weighted more).
Who This is Valuable For
Depending on the size of your organization, you may have different stakeholders. If you’re a small business or midsize enterprise, this data will be valuable for:
Demand Generation Teams
Optimize and improve campaigns by identifying which touchpoints are most influential at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Marketing Analysts
Improve communication and collaboration with marketing managers and executives by having detailed data to communicate the impact of marketing efforts and specific campaign touchpoints.
VPs of Marketing
Increase the insight into the impact of each marketing touchpoint and how it’s contributing to conversions with detailed views of each touchpoint.
Chief Marketing Officers
Enhance the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by detecting the strategies that are generating the best results and quality conversions.
AVPs, VPs of Sales, Chief Revenue Officers
Increase revenue by optimizing sales strategies, improving lead qualification, and enhancing sales and marketing alignment.
*If you’re an Enterprise organization, you can expect this data to be valuable for all of the above roles, aside from VPs of Product and VPs of Sales.
Why Use Multi-Touch Attribution
Customers interact with many different events during the buying journey, and multi-touch attribution models help gain insight into the different touch points along said journey and how each impacts conversion. Multi-touch models provide a comprehensive view, superior to Single Touch models, helping marketers decide the optimal combination of channels and messages to elevate their marketing programs’ ROI. They are also helpful for marketers looking to shorten their sales cycle by engaging customers with fewer but more impactful marketing messages.
Learn more with Calibermind’s Definitive Guide to Multi-Touch Attribution.
What Is Needed For Multi-Touch Attribution
Data You Need
- Any data that represents a “touch”. Lead Sources UTM, Salesforce campaign, event attendee list, etc.
- Opportunity data (opened, closed won, closed lost) and/or the conversion event data you wish to measure.
- Agreed upon “time-bound”. For long sales circles, you may wish to look back 180 days or even 365 prior– relative to the conversion date. This sets the stage to how far back data should be accounted for.
Data Sources Required
The more [clean] “event” data sets you can add, the more robust the resulting model will be. For example, a log of website visits + email clicks + form submissions + sales activity is better than just having one of those sources. This includes any marketing or sales activity involving an interaction with the customer. This dataset will become the source data for attribution. These events (or touches) are all eligible to get the credit for the conversion.
- Marketing Automation Platform (Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, Pardot, etc.)
- CRM (Salesforce, SAP, etc.)
- AnalyticsJS/ product behavior
- Web Analytics (Google, Adobe)
- Ad Platforms (Google Ads, LinkedIn, Facebook)
Key Considerations When Selecting a Multi-Touch Attribution Model
There are many ways to build multi-touch attribution — some more robust than others! Below are some key things to consider when determining if multi-touch attribution is right for you and how to apply it to your own data.
Be Aware of the Caveats
Marketing teams everywhere are adopting multi-touch models, and they are certainly an improvement from single-touch and a step in the right direction toward accurately reporting on attribution. This being said, each model has its caveats, and they must be considered when selecting which attribution model is right for your business.
Gain Alignment on Time Constraints
It’s crucial that before you begin building a multi-touch model, you gain alignment on the timeframe in which touchpoints must have occurred relative to conversion for them to be included (ex. “Only touches up to 60 days before a closed opportunity will count”).
Without determining how far in advance (or how recent) a touch point either becomes invalid or too significantly weighted, you may be including touch points that aren’t related to the revenue you’re reporting on.
Start with a Pivot Table
To better understand the concepts in multi-touch, sometimes it’s easier to take a first pass at a data model.
To build a basic multi-touch model, start by looking at a data set that pulls in campaign types, how many days from touch point to close, how much revenue is associated with each touch point, and how you’ll weigh them.
Here’s an example of how to download and format a data set:
This will enable you to create charts like this:
