What is digital attribution?
Attribution is the English term for the word attribution. This makes good sense in relation to this topic. Because it's about attributing value to your marketing channels. As written above, it is wrong to think that the marketing activity that finally triggered a purchase is the most effective one. It takes more data to make that conclusion than just a purchase.
You need to look at the whole customer journey
To find the right marketing mixyou need to look at the whole customer journey. What if you just think that your Google Ads on vacuum cleaner deals, for example, are doing all the work to attract the customers who buy from your store? Then you're most likely wrong.
There may be more marketing activities behind your Google Ads 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 out by searching 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 comes across a text ad on Google for the same website that did the test, to look at prices - the vacuum cleaner that Ole would like is on sale, but Ole wants to make sure that it is not available cheaper from a competitor. So Ole ends up searching for "vacuum cleaner name on offer" from which he chooses Google Shopping to get a summary. Ole realises that you actually have the best offer and therefore 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 find out that this was the product and that it should be bought 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 more accurately attributing value to the different points in your customers' journey to purchase from your store.
The way Google Attribution does that is by distributing value database-wise. Using Ole's example above, Google will assign one concrete value to organic search, one concrete value to the text ad, one concrete value to the shopping result.
