What is digital attribution?
Attribution is the English term for the word attribution. This makes sense in relation to this topic. Because it's all about attributing value to your marketing channels. As written above, it's a mistake to think that the marketing activity that finally triggered a purchase is the most effective. It takes more data to make this conclusion than just a purchase.
You need to look at the entire customer journey
To find the right one for you marketing mixyou need to take a closer look at the entire customer journey. If you think that your Google Ads ad for vacuum cleaner deals, for example, is doing all the work to attract customers to your store? Then you're most likely wrong.
There may be several marketing activities behind your Google Ads ad that contributed to the purchase - if you had turned these off, the purchase may not have happened at all.
Let's take an example for the sake of understanding:
Ole wants to buy a new vacuum cleaner. He starts by searching on Google and comes across an organic result, which is a guide to which vacuum cleaner has won the most tests this year. Ole investigates the market further and in the process comes across a text ad on Google for the same website that did the test, to take a closer look at the prices - the vacuum cleaner Ole would like is on offer, but Ole wants to be absolutely sure that it is not available cheaper from a competitor. So Ole ends up searching for "vacuum cleaner name on offer" from which he selects Google Shopping to get an overview. Ole realizes that you actually have the most advantageous offer and therefore Ole buys his new vacuum cleaner from you.
Do you see the idea? In this example, Ole didn't start by pressing your Google Shopping adInstead, he went through a long buying journey to decide that it should be that product and that it should be purchased from you.
Google Attribution can help you
As you might have guessed, this exercise can be complicated - it requires a lot of data and the good news is that Google Attribution can help you improve your marketing efforts by assigning more accurate value to the different points in your customers' journey towards buying from your store.
The way Google Attribution does this is by distributing the value based on data. If we take the above example with Ole as a starting point, Google will assign one specific value to organic search, one specific value to the text ad, one specific value to the shopping result.
