Understanding Attribution
Attribution is the process of identifying and assigning credit to the marketing touchpoints that a consumer encounters before they complete a purchase or another conversion event.
This plays an important role in understanding which channels, campaigns, or ads are contributing to the desired outcomes. This allows marketers to optimize their strategies and allocate their budgets more effectively to maximize return on investment (ROI).
Marketers wish they could get full certainty on what marketing campaigns have driven what revenue. But attributing revenue or other conversion events back to marketing touch points is complicated.
We are limited by what can be tracked, and for all the talk of online tracking, the technology is limited and anonymised. Ad platforms will report conversion events that they are able to track, but this is often only a subset of the total conversions campaigns have actually driven.
So how do we measure the full impact of a marketing channel beyond what is tracked and attributed within the platform?
There are options which we will discuss at the end of this article, but first we want to share a natural experiment from one of our recent projects which enabled us to measure the untracked conversions for one of our brands.
The Natural Experiment
As soon as a business is active across multiple marketing channels, it becomes hard to quantify unattributed conversions.
However we have recently ran some paid campaigns for MEOR on Meta. With a retail outlet in St Ives, their online presence was relatively new with no prior digital marketing or Meta ads. The Shopify site was receiving negligible traffic and revenue.
This laid the foundations for a natural experiment. As we started to observe revenue increasing after we started Meta campaigns, we could assume that this is the only variable significant enough to be responsible for the additional revenue.
Natural experiments are observational studies relying on external factors or events that naturally assign subjects, allowing for the analysis of causal effects in real-world settings.
The Results
Revenue increased from £ 108 in the period before Meta Ads to £ 1,498 in the period where Meta Ads were running. A £ 1,390 increase.
However in Meta, the revenue tracked was only £483. So where did the other £1,000 or so come from?
In our experience from having seen similar results time and time again, this is the untracked revenue generated by the Meta Ads campaigns.
Meta was only able to track about 33% of the conversions it was able to generate!
As with all natural experiments it is important to highlight that it is entirely possible that external factors contributed to this uplift in revenue. However the time periods selected and the rate of increase in revenue do suggest extremely strong causation. Even if we account for revenue that would have occurred regardless of whether Meta was running, this would only weaken the results, but we still would conclude that there is a significant amount of revenue which Meta has failed to track and attribute in-platform.
This highlights a few things which are important to remember when running any paid marketing campaign:
Tracking within the platform will only ever report a subset of the actual conversions it has impacted
Always combine in platform reporting with Blended reporting (e-commerce platform conversion v marketing platform spend) when making budget allocation decisions or evaluating marketing channels
Understand attribution models and use a combination of different models depending on your objectives
Work With PD
At Purpose Digital, our experience across industries and product categories gives us a great foundation to recommend a Meta Ads strategy that will best meet your business and your goals. We offer advice in our exploration calls and they are always FREE. So get in touch!
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