GUEST COMMENT Can you tell if your attribution model is working if your customer calls?

by Ross Fobian

Attribution has a key role to play in helping marketers understand how their customers behave through the purchase process and consequently in creating the optimum marketing and promotional mix.

Being able to accurately attribute a single conversion to multiple marketing channels and use this as an overall measurement to provide meaningful insight is a crucial part of this process. However doing this is extremely difficult.

The fact is, there are a number of models being used to assess the value of each channel. There is no single attribution model that will be right for all types of business, nor should there be only one model for a business. There is no such thing as ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to attribution.


Each of these models has its advantages and disadvantages. Both ‘first click’ and ‘last click’ disregard other channels in the purchase process, whereas linear models take into account all the touch points within a customer journey, but they do not assess the importance of each touch point. More complicated models use the level of interaction to gauge importance, but these too are not always accurate. It is important to create a model which suits the nuances of a particular organisation, factors in all the pre-existing customer insight, the marketer’s knowledge of their own marketing activity and the different paths to conversion.

We know that analytics tools make it possible to track the relationship between online marketing activity and online conversions. However, some of the biggest challenges for marketers are understanding the combined impact of offline and online marketing activity on conversions and the impact of online marketing activity on offline conversions.

One aspect of this is connecting online marketing activity to offline telephone conversions. So how does that work when you apply call tracking to your analytics? Call tracking technology tracks the journey a visitor takes when they call your business, from the initial search or entry point through to the web pages they looked at before during and after the call. This then allows you to see offline phone call conversions within your online analytics data so you can apply your chosen attribution model.

Every organisation needs to be sure that they are investing their resources effectively and producing a return for their marketing spend. Marketing attribution can help maximize the results of this investment as a complete understanding of each channels contribution to the bottom line can be gained. Where phone calls are important to the business, a business should look to implement a call tracking solution which offers marketing attribution to ensure they get the best return on investment.

Ross Fobian, is chief executive and co-founder of ResponseTap.