Our approach to Attribution

In our experience, calls, sales and conversions are rarely caused by a single piece of marketing, or occur on a single site visit. User journeys are often complicated and can be influenced by marketing activity taking place across multiple channels.

Despite this, most conversion tracking is set up to attribute on-site actions to a single source; usually the last visit. This creates some important issues:

1. It doesn't accurately reflect or value the influence of different channels on a sale or action
2. Often the last visit before a sale takes place is a search on a brand term or a direct visit – leading to over exposure of brand terms and loss of key contributors earlier in the buying cycle
3. Multiple suppliers can claim credit for a sale, leading to time-consuming manual de-duplication

Our approach to attribution allows consistent valuation of marketing channels. The accurately-attributed sales can be used for both reporting and PPC bid optimisation. Infinity has the ability to run many attribution models simultaneously; allowing comparison of models and what-if analysis.

1. Track all visits and repeat visits and link them to a call, sale or conversion
2. Use a standard model like First Click, Last Click, Equally Weighted, Bath Tub and many more to choose from
3. Build your own custom attribution models
4. Run many attribution models simultaneously this allows comparisons of models
5. Compare results from your custom attribution models against standard attribution models, such as First Click or Last Click
6. Measure the value of marketing sources that engage a user early in the buying cycle (research phase)
7. Assign ‘weightings’ to different channels depending on the position within the buying cycle

Absolute Last Click

The Infinity Portal runs in an Absolute Last Click model as default. If you do not have an attribution model set in your Portal then this is what you will be shown as standard.
The Absolute click is the marketing source stored in the visitor's cookie when they land. This is stored against each trigger they generate on site since the last land.  A trigger could be any of the following:

• Land
• Page View
• Call
• Call to action eg. brochure download, email out click

It is also copied into each call trigger when they are matched to a page view.  

So how do Last Click and Last Click Absolute models differ?
The key difference is that Last Click is based on a look back of trigger activity and has a limited look back window, and Last Click (Absolute) has an infinite look back window and is based on what is seen in the cookie.

Standard Edition Attribution Models

Our Small Business Edition packages can have either a First Click model or a Last Click model set up for them. To enable either of these models please email our Support Team.

Professional & Enterprise Suite of Attribution Models

Infinity Premium Edition models have a suite of Attribution models already set so you can start gathering data for all models simultaneously from set up. Outlined below are the models and their definitions.

• Last click: attributes 100% of the conversion to the last channel touch point the customer had before converting.
• First click: gives 100% of the conversion to the first channel touch point the customer had before converting.
• Equally weighted: spreads the conversion equally across all channel touch points in a customer journey before converting.
• First click weighted: gives greater weighting to the first touch point then a lesser, evenly spread weighting to any subsequent touch points.
• Last click weighted: gives greater weighting to the last touch point and then a lesser, evenly spread weighting to any previous touch points.
• First and last click weighted: gives greater weighting to the first and last touch points in a customer journey with any touch points between sharing the remaining weighting equally.

• Equally weighted PPC Only: spreads the conversion equally across all PPC touch points in a customer journey before converting.

  Our suite of Attribution models have a look back window of 90 days, the exception to this is the Equally weighted PPC Only model which has a look back window of 30 days. We use a shorter look back window for the PPC model to fall in line with other PPC management tools such as Adwords, Marin etc.

Attribution Lookback Windows

Our lookback windows are described in days, but they will actually be in hours. For example, a 1-day lookback window would look at channel touchpoints 24-hours prior to the call/goal occurring, 2-day model would look at channel touchpoints 48-hours prior to the call/goal occurring, etc.

For example, if a call on a Monday afternoon was linked to a PPC land on Sunday morning, and you had a 1-day lookback attribution model applied, then the Sunday morning land wouldn't show up in this model (as it was over 24 hours before the call/goal). You might consider using a 2-day window to cover this.

Please note that this process doesn't account for daylight savings, so if you come to look at data across a time-change period you might notice an hour's variance.