A Complete Guide to Marketing Attribution Software

Woohoo, you just scored a conversion. Where’s it come from, exactly? Marketing attribution software should tell you. These are tools (like Tapfiliate) that tell you which point in your audiences’ customer journeys contributed to a sale. We’ll walk through different marketing attribution models, why they’re important for your affiliate marketing strategy, and ways to leverage marketing attribution for more results. 

What Is Marketing Attribution?

Marketing attribution is a way to determine which marketing tactics, channels, or customer touchpoints contributed to a sale or other type of conversion. It’s vital in affiliate marketing because it helps brands figure out which tactics are most effective and to use that data to inform future strategies. 

For example, let’s say a brand sees a ton of conversions that occur after audiences visit their website. You could attribute the conversion to a website element or perhaps the channel that helped the audience navigate to that website. Question is, how do you determine which touchpoint is the attribution? That’s where models come in. 

What Are the Main Types of Marketing Attribution Models?

There’s a thousand ways to skin a cat, but four main ways to determine marketing attribution: 

• Single-Touch Attribution: Identifies one touchpoint as having 100% of attribution credit. 
• Multi-Touch Attribution: Distributes attribution credit to multiple marketing touchpoints
• Data-Driven Attribution: Machine learning model that provides specific percentages for multiple customer interactions and metrics, like time between touchpoints, device, location, demographic, and more.

We’ll dive into these models a bit deeper shortly; but first, let’s cover why we use them. 

Benefits of Marketing Attribution

So, where’s the value in knowing where your sales come from? 

Here are a few of the best benefits of attribution for marketing teams: 

Better Budget Allocation

Imagine you have 30 sales attributed to one affiliate marketer’s Instagram story and 2 to your brand’s SEO blog article. Chances are, you’d want to allocate more money (in this case, commission value) to your affiliate since they bring you more revenue. 

Enhanced Understanding of Customer Journey: 

The path a web visitor takes to become a customer varies across different industries, business sizes, niches, and more. It’s important to have an accurate picture of the many interactions your customer has with your brand before a purchase: this is known as the customer journey.

For example, the B2B customer journey (especially for SaaS brands) tends to be longer because those audiences need more time to consider a bigger investment via higher price tags and regular subscription payments. 

On the other hand, the entire customer journey for e-commerce brands might revolve more around more retail specific channels and touchpoints, like Shopify stores and Instagram Ads. 

Marketing attribution helps you dissect the unique customer journey for every business. 

Improved Marketing ROI

Attribution data helps you improve marketing performance and ROI. The insights you get from attribution give you the scoop on every asset, web page, social channel, affiliate, or promotion that helps or slows down your sales. 

When you have access to these data insights, you can make more data-driven decisions to boost marketing ROI. 

Optimized Affiliate Marketing Performance

Accurate attribution for revenue is important for all facets of marketing. However, it provides particularly useful benefits for affiliate marketing strategies. For example, it supports: 

• Affiliate engagement: The reporting knowledge from marketing attribution helps you give affiliates more useful advice to bring you sales and in turn, increase their commissions. 

• Partner performance analysis: Your affiliates ideally bring you regular conversions, but the ones who don’t? You won’t really know unless you assess attribution and compare your partners against each one.

• Commission structures: Most affiliates may have a percentage-based fee on commissions, and, sometimes, a base rate as well. But when you work with Tapfiliate’s marketing attribution tool? If you see more revenue and sales attributed to particular affiliates, you can engage them further with flexible commissions that increase automatically.

You can see sales and revenue attribution to certain partners, channels, and ads — but how can you measure performance over time? 

Key Metrics Used in Marketing Attribution

Metrics help you visualize the effectiveness of your affiliate marketing efforts. Popular metrics include: 

• Conversion rate: This metric measures your number of conversions against the total number of people who interacted with your affiliate or brand content.  
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): This displays the average amount of money you spend to acquire a new customer. 
• Return on ad spend (ROAS): This measures your total ad spend against your return. 
• Lifetime Value (LTV): This shows you the total dollar value of a customer throughout the term of their engagement with your brand. 

These metrics help you measure the quality of your leads as well as the overall strengths and effectiveness of your affiliate partnerships. 

Attribution Models

As discussed, attribution models give you a variety of ways to attribute revenue to different marketing tactics. 

What Is a Single-Touch Attribution Model?

Single-touch attribution models attribute 100% of the credit to a single customer touchpoint, either the first or last touch. For example, if a customer purchases a product after clicking an affiliate ad then an affiliate coupon code on that same affiliate’s Instagram story, attribution is given to one or the other actions — not both. 

But we can get more specific as well.

First-Touch Attribution: How Does It Work, and When Should It Be Used?

Let’s say a customer saw your affiliate’s Instagram story, clicked a link to your website, signed up for your newsletter, and a week later, purchased a product. Single-touch attribution would attribute the conversion to only to the first touchpoint mentioned above: your affiliate’s social media story. 

Here’s the thing: conversions don’t usually happen on the first touch. The sales pipeline nurtures a lead throughout multiple customer interactions before that audience member turns into a paying customer. 

Meaning?

First touch attribution isn’t the best attribution model for conversions. However, it’s a solid model for more top-funnel customer actions, like: 

• Website visits
• Social media impressions
• Ad clicks

Last-Touch Attribution: What Are Its Benefits and Drawbacks?

Last-touch attribution credits the final customer interaction before a purchase. Here’s an example: 

You’re a finance SaaS brand with a group of affiliates promoting your service to find more subscribers. 

One audience member follows your affiliate on TikTok and sees a product demo on their story. They click the demo link, but don’t signup for a trila just yet. First, they peruse your website and explore your service pages. Then, they look at your brand’s social media content. Only a few weeks later,  when they notice an ad for your product, they make a purchase. 

Your affiliate definitely helped you score that conversion, and your cookie window might even reward them a commission for it. But under the last-touch attribution mode, none of your affiliate’s strategies, your social media content, or website gets the attribution credit. Instead, your pay-per-click ad receives 100% of the attribution credit. 

This model really helps you identify the most persuasive tactics in your marketing strategy. However, they tend to dismiss all the behind-the-scenes work that made it possible for that persuasive tactic to actually convert your customer. 

What Is a Multi-Touch Attribution Model?

Multi-touch attribution models give attribution credit to every customer touchpoint in the sales funnel. We mentioned a few examples where a potential customer sees social media content, affiliate posts, ads, and websites before making a purchase. This attribution model credits every single one of those touchpoints with credit, and divides the credit on a percentage basis that reflects the weight of each touchpoint. 

This model is great for understanding your customer lifecycle, which is especially beneficial for SaaS brands or any other industry with longer or more complex user journeys. However, the percentage-based credit to each touchpoint is assumed and not always completely accurate. It’s also not effective in measuring the weight of offline touchpoints.

What Is Data-Driven Attribution?

Data-driven attribution is a popular attribution model on Google Ads that examines data from both conversions and non-converting paths. It evaluates all customer touchpoints as well as customer data like browser, device type, and even demographics. This attribution model not only evaluates the effectiveness of your marketing tactics, but it helps you identify key attributes of audiences that convert. 

It’s a great model for brands that want to identify new audience segments and learn more about their target audience. However, the breadth of data and attribution is more complicated to analyze and gain accurate insights from compared to other attribution models.
What Are the Challenges of Implementing a Marketing Attribution Model?

Marketing attribution is a component of nearly 76% of brand strategies, according to Google. However, some challenges prohibit sales teams from making the most of the attribution models, like: 

• Changing consumer behavior: You might need a skilled data analyst to understand and interpret changes in consumer behavior, otherwise you might see attributions that don’t feel coherent enough to generate valuable insights. 
• Data quality: If you don’t have access to customer data or accurate affiliate link tracking, you might not generate the most accurate marketing attributions. 
• Integration complexities: You might use specific marketing software like Mailchimp for emails, or Salesforce for CRM — if your multi-touch marketing attribution software for affiliates doesn’t integrate, you might not access the most accurate data. Psssst. Tapfiliate integrates with both of these systems, as well as 30+ others!

Tapfiliate for Marketing Attribution in Affiliate Marketing

Tapfiliate’s real-time affiliate link and conversion tracking gives brands a detailed eye on performance by affiliate, channel, asset, and more. You can toggle and get granular with filtrable charts to see the attribution specs that matter most to you. We also offer coupon codes to help you with offline conversion tracking, too.

Or, you can download those charts from our in-depth reports section. Here, you can download results based on mobile environment, publisher ID (affiliate), as well as product SKUs and domain. 

How Do You Choose the Right Attribution Model for Your Business?

The right attribution model depends on your business industry, niche, goals, and access to data. Each model is also beneficial for different marketing objectives. For example, you might use first-touch attribution to evaluate top-funnel content effectiveness and lead generation tactics, multi-touch attribution to understand your customer journey better, and last-touch to identify conversion-effective tactics. 

Start Today

No matter your attribution model, you’ll need solid affiliate marketing data for the most actionable insights. That’s where Tapfiliate comes in. Our real-time tracking gives you a laser-sharp picture of how each element in your affiliate program performs. We offer in-platform communication to engage and nurture affiliates, as well as potent attribution accuracy to determine the most effective parts of your strategy. 

Chrissy Kapralos

Chrissy Kapralos runs a Toronto-based writing agency called No Worries Writing Co. She’s passionate about helping businesses communicate and share their stories. When she isn’t writing about the latest tech and marketing content, you’ll find her traveling, cooking, or watching horror movies.