This content was sponsored by DAC Group. The views expressed are the sponsor’s own.
To create websites and marketing campaigns that boost conversions, it’s crucial to understand your customers’ needs and the timing of those needs.
What drives a prospect to connect with you or purchase your product throughout their journey?
How do you track this process?
What strategies should you prioritize to increase your profit and ROI?
In digital marketing, one of the essential strategies is understanding the complete customer journey to make informed strategic decisions.
However, as any SEO expert will tell you, assessing the impact of a single digital tactic can be challenging, especially when dealing with a complex web of nonlinear user interactions.
So, where do you start?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. What Is A Customer Journey?
2. What Is A Marketing Funnel?
3. What Is Attribution?
4. Which Types Of Attribution Should You Focus On?
5. First-Touch Attribution: Capturing Initial Engagement
6. Last-Touch Attribution: Closing The Conversion Loop
7. Best Of Both Worlds: Layering First- And Last-Touch For Holistic Insights
8. Analyze How Users Are Exposed To Your Site
9. Assess The Likelihood Of A Session Converting
10. Determine The Impact Of Your First Entry Point On Last-Touch Conversion Rates
11. Determine The Impact Of Your First Entry Point On Last-Touch Average Order Values
12. Evaluate The Contribution Of Early-Journey Marketing On Other Channel Revenue
13. Measure The Impact Of Early-Journey Content (Blog)
In this article, you will discover how first-touch and last-touch attribution can be used together to highlight the contributions of each channel – including organic search – and transform your understanding of the customer journey from the initial spark of awareness to the moment of conversion.
To begin, let’s explore the foundation of multi-touch attribution: the customer journey and how to attribute each touchpoint to a sale.
The first step is understanding the entire customer journey.
What Is A Customer Journey?
A customer journey is a marketing concept that outlines how a prospect evolves from being introduced to your brand to becoming a customer.
Essentially, the customer journey is a vital tool for websites that aim to convert visitors. It provides a blueprint for creating an effective, user-centered design that addresses users’ needs and behaviors directly.
This strategic approach enhances the user experience and drives higher conversion rates, ultimately benefiting your business’s bottom line.
At a granular level, every interaction a prospect has with your brand’s content is a step in that journey – each piece that motivates a shopper to become a buyer.
As you can imagine, each customer journey is entirely unique, with every user having distinct needs that are met through multiple interactions with your brand. These interactions help a prospect make the final decision to convert.
Ideally, your brand has a vast array of content, web pages, articles, blogs, ads, emails, social media posts, and traditional marketing assets that influence a visitor to engage with your services or purchase your product.
While vital to your marketing strategy, individual customer journeys are too numerous to study at such a granular level.
Therefore, categorizing each journey into a high-level view known as a marketing funnel helps track and optimize what’s working within your marketing assets. From there, you can better identify which tactics turn the most visitors into customers.
What Is A Marketing Funnel?
A traditional marketing funnel comprises five layers representing a group of potential customers along their high-level customer journey.
The layers of a marketing funnel typically include:
– Awareness
– Interest
– Consideration
– Nurture
– Conversion
Most new customers begin at the top of the funnel, the Awareness stage. This is where they first learn about your brand, making it often the first touchpoint a prospect has with your products.
From there, they may show interest in your brand and consider taking steps towards purchasing from you. They are then nurtured into conversion, which usually culminates in a sale.
To maximize your marketing funnel, it’s important to know what attracts the highest percentage of potential customers to your brand and what convinces the highest percentage of potential buyers to convert.
Once you have that information, you can optimize additional content to emulate top performers and increase sales.
But how do you know exactly what content in the funnel led to a sale for each customer? Through Attribution.
What Is Attribution?
Marketing attribution is the process of assigning a conversion to a specific piece of marketing material.
Attribution reveals which pieces of content were most effective at converting a visitor to a customer.
This can be achieved using tracking codes, such as UTMs and pixels, phone call tracking, and special URLs.
To decide what types of tracking to implement, start by learning about the different attribution types.
Which Types Of Attribution Should You Focus On?
There are several marketing attribution types to consider, but the most effective for a first, powerful multi-touch campaign are:
– First-Touch Attribution
– Last-Touch Attribution
Traditionally, you may have used first-touch and last-touch attribution models to optimize campaigns for maximum impact.
Each approach has its benefits, but when combined, they form something greater: multi-touch attribution.
Today, we’ll focus on increasing conversions by examining a user’s initial and final interactions with your brand’s marketing materials.
First-Touch Attribution: Capturing Initial Engagement
First-touch attribution emphasizes the first interaction a user has with your brand.
This initial touchpoint can occur on different channels, such as social media, organic search, or referral links. Common web analytics tools like Google Analytics 4 and Adobe Analytics provide customizable attribution models to track initial touchpoints effectively.
Despite its distance from the final conversion, first-touch attribution has several key benefits:
1. Understanding Awareness: This approach allows marketers to evaluate the effectiveness of top-of-funnel marketing efforts. By identifying the channels that attract users initially, brands can optimize their awareness-building strategies to better “feed the funnel”.
2. Budget Allocation: Knowing which channels are responsible for first interactions can help allocate marketing budgets efficiently. By investing in channels driving initial engagement, marketers can enhance spending efficiency and ROI.
3. Tailoring Content: Analyzing the first touchpoint offers insights into the type of content that resonates with the audience. Marketers can adjust their content strategies to create more engaging and relevant material for their target audiences.
Last-Touch Attribution: Closing The Conversion Loop
Conversely, last-touch attribution identifies the final interaction leading to a conversion.
Although it’s a straightforward metric, last-touch attribution has benefits as well:
1. Conversion Optimization: By focusing on the last touchpoint, marketers can pinpoint the specific channels or campaigns contributing directly to conversions, optimizing campaigns for higher conversion rates.
2. Efficient Resource Allocation: Similar to first-touch attribution, understanding the last touchpoint aids effective resource allocation. Marketers can invest in channels or campaigns directly impacting closures and revenue generation.
3. Campaign Effectiveness: Last-touch attribution provides clarity on which marketing effort is directly responsible for desired user actions. This insight is crucial for measuring specific campaign success and making data-driven decisions.
Best Of Both Worlds: Layering First- And Last-Touch For Holistic Insights
While each attribution model offers unique insights, combining them provides a detailed and nuanced view of the customer journey.
The result: multi-touch attribution allows marketers to comprehend the entire conversion path and make informed decisions at every stage, supercharging insights in numerous ways.
Let’s delve deeper into understanding and applying these insights.
1. Analyze How Users Are Exposed To Your Site
First-touch attribution counts clicks based on the channel that initially drove a user to the site, helping marketers understand each channel’s role in initial site exposure.
Conversely, last-touch attribution focuses on the last channel a user engaged with, often overvaluing contributions from end-of-funnel channels.
Multi-touch attribution combines these perspectives, offering a comprehensive understanding of each channel’s role from initial interest to final conversion and mitigating over- or undervaluation risks.
2. Assess The Likelihood Of A Session Converting
In typical last-touch attribution scenarios, conversion rates are based on a user’s last-interacted channel, often valuing late-journey channels while ignoring early-journey efforts.
By additionally analyzing first-touch conversion rates, marketers can better appreciate early-journey marketing tactics and channels’ value.
3. Determine The Impact Of Your First Entry Point On Last-Touch Conversion Rates
This analysis investigates early-journey marketing’s impact on last-touch conversion rates, comparing typical channel conversion rates with those where organic search was the first entry point.
This comparison measures the effectiveness of early-journey tactics on late-journey performance.
4. Determine The Impact Of Your First Entry Point On Last-Touch Average Order Values
Similar to analyzing first-touch impact on conversion rates, one can determine the effect of a user’s initial access point on subsequent order value.
Evidence often shows that when organic search initiates the journey, last-touch channels often realize higher average order values.
5. Evaluate The Contribution Of Early-Journey Marketing On Other Channel Revenue
By comparing revenue attribution across first-touch and last-touch, marketers understand how much revenue is attributed to other channels, offering insights into each channel’s role during the conversion process.
This is particularly useful to comprehend each channel’s role while guiding users throughout the conversion journey.
6. Measure The Impact Of Early-Journey Content (Blog)
Early-journey research and informational content frequently are undervalued when assessed through last-touch attribution, as they usually yield fewer immediate conversions.
By tracking over a more extended period, we find that blog visitors tend to return within weeks to make purchases.
Utilizing only last-touch attribution obscures this trend.
Beyond investigating blog conversions, analyzing shows users who visit the blog convert at higher rates, have more page views per visit, and lower bounce rates.
In a constantly evolving digital marketing environment, understanding customer interactions with your brand is crucial for success.
First-touch and last-touch attribution models offer distinct advantages, from optimizing awareness-building strategies to refining conversion-focused campaigns.
Leveraging insights from these attribution models and combining them, marketers can create more targeted campaigns, leading to better results and maximizing return on investment.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Created by DAC Group. Used with permission.
