When a customer finally clicks that buy button or contacts your sales team, it’s a sweet victory for all the effort you put into marketing. Online marketers like to know what led to the final sale since there are so many marketing channels and avenues.
Was it a Google search that led the customer to the company’s website? Was it social media or some other referral site? This last click before landing on the sales page has always been considered critical information. That’s because if people are more likely to convert via social media versus other sources then you would spend more money on social media ads and vice versa.
But as customer touch points (email, social media, search, referrals, in-store, phone calls) increase, the last click attribution is not as simple as it used to be anymore. A customer may interact with several touch points before making a purchase.
That means marketers cannot attribute 100 per cent influence to the last click, but need to give due attribution to all the touchpoints which were involved in the purchase. This is easier said than done since customers use multiple devices and channels. Many customer journeys are lost as they switch devices. Besides, the current tools and solutions are complicated to set up and connect.
Enter Google Attribution, a brand new tool with the motto “Give credit where it’s due with data-driven attribution.”
Powered by machine learning, this tool assigns attribution scores to different touchpoints along the path to purchase. The end goal is to help marketers understand which marketing channels are instrumental in providing results.
Another way to use this information would be to predict how many sales can be expected by scaling up operations. Besides that, marketers can also gain understanding into how a presence of a particular channel helps increase or decrease conversions and sales. This ensures that there is a collaboration of strategy, action, and reporting.
Google shared a preview of this tool.
Hello Google Attribution, goodbye last-click: Measure marketing impact across channels & devices. Watch the demo: https://t.co/tZCZtcHi0k pic.twitter.com/4imcRlZDv3
— Google Ads (@GoogleAds) May 23, 2017
Google Attribution is currently in beta stage and will be slowly rolled out during 2017. However, Google is not the first to create such a solution. There are solutions geared towards B2B marketers such as BrightFunnel. Then there is Bizible and Adobe’s offering.
Of course, the advantage of Google’s tool is that it’s free to use.
