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What is Multi-touch Attribution?

Definition of Multi-touch Attribution

In the marketing attribution context, multi-touch attribution is the process in which multiple touchpoints in a customer journey are being rewarded for their contribution to the purchase. In this way, you can evaluate the real value of each touchpoint in the customer journey.

The opposite way of measuring the value of your marketing efforts is “single-touch attribution”. With this method only one touchpoint is being credited for the transaction. If you want to know more about single-touch attribution, click here.

Why is Multi-touch Attribution important?

Although marketing attribution as a concept is not new, it’s still somewhat unknown in the marketing landscape mainly because it may sound daunting. E-commerce companies often find hard to use digital attribution.

In the current landscape, marketers and advertisers divide their media budgets over several channels. This is what we call multichannel marketing. It makes you, as a marketer, face many choices and decisions to take.

The starting point is to understand the customer journey and keep track of all the digital interactions customers take before they ultimately buy something. In this way, you will avoid spending money on promoting the wrong channels.

By gaining a better understanding of the impact of each specific touchpoint in the customer journey, you can allocate your marketing budget more effectively and wisely. In other words, you measure the real value of your digital channels (e.g. social, email or paid search) and decide where to cut down your spending and where to invest more money based on data.

According to Salesforce, customers go through 6 - 8 touchpoints before they become viable leads, which can include many traffic sources like Facebook ads or a Google search.

In an effort to see the effect of your media spend, you check the data at each channel separately. So, for example, if you want to measure the effectiveness of your Google Ads, you look at Google Ads, and if you want to measure the effectiveness of your Facebook ads, you look at Facebook.

Looking at each channel individually isn’t giving you any real insights, though. It might be even confusing. The reason is that each of these traffic channels is purely showing its own data. So, when looking at each channel individually, you’re missing the bigger picture.

To solve this problem you should start using multi-touch attribution. By analyzing the relation between your channels, you can even understand which of them make your customers buy.

Let’s see how valuable multi-touch attribution is with an example.

A consumer wants to buy a new pair of white sneakers. After doing some research online, they start seeing ads with Adidas white sneakers, but they don’t click on them. Next day, they see a similar ad, but this time on their Instagram feed and click on it. This ad leads them to Adidas official website. Then, they receive a discount voucher for Adidas sneakers via email and, eventually, use it to purchase a pair of white sneakers.

Each of the above mentioned ads plays an important role in the customer journey. Multi-touch attribution provides marketers with a complete view of the value of each ad. On the contrary, single-touch attribution would give all the credits to only one touchpoint. In most cases this is the last touchpoint in the customer journey, here the email communication.

There are different attribution models available. We can divide them in two categories, the single-touch and the multi-touch attribution models.

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