Attribution Model

An attribution model is the rule you use to decide which advert gets the credit for a sale, and it sounds like a small accounting question. It is really the rule that decides where next month's money goes, because whatever looks successful in the report is what gets paid for again.

Here is how that looks in an ordinary week. A woman sees your post on Instagram on Sunday, searches your shop name on Tuesday and reads a page, then clicks an advert on Friday and buys. That is three touches and one sale: Instagram found her, the page answered her question, and the advert closed the deal. Most tools hand the whole sale to that last click, simply because it is the easiest thing to measure.

That habit is the last-click trap, and it slowly kills the adverts that are doing the real work. The last advert always looks brilliant, while the post that introduced you to a stranger looks useless, so the owner cuts it. Three months later the closing adverts have nobody left to convince, and sales fall for a reason nobody in the room can name.

The harder problem sits outside the software altogether, because plenty of buying never touches a browser. A customer phones you, another walks in and asks for the thing she saw, and a third sends your number to a cousin. No ad platform sees any of that, so none of it is reported, and the channel that actually fills your shop looks empty on the screen.

The fix is not a cleverer model but a question, asked out loud at the counter and printed as one more field on your enquiry form. How did you hear about us. The answer then has to be written next to the order rather than on a sticky note. Linkysoft starts most digital marketing work there, because one honest month of answers beats a year of guessing. That is also why the work often grows into a small web application, so that calls, walk-ins and clicks all land in one list.

Then pick a model and keep it, giving the first touch some of the credit and the last touch some of it. Read the result as a direction rather than a fact, because attribution is never exact, and Linkysoft says so before the first report is handed over. It only has to be less wrong than the last click.