Customers rarely take a linear path to purchase. They won’t see one ad and then immediately click over and buy, which makes it difficult for brands to track where the conversion originated from. 

The customer journey is often much more complex and usually includes various marketing channels, such as paid ads, organic search, social media, referrals, and traditional print marketing. 

For data-driven marketers, this can be frustrating. Not knowing how much credit to give each channel for a conversion makes it difficult to focus future efforts and choose strategies that get the best results. 

The kicker is that technology is driving big changes in customer expectations. A linear path is no longer enough to serve every single customer; rather, each individual should have the option to choose their route to purchase via their preferred methods. To do this successfully requires a brand to have a deep understanding of their customers’ wants, needs, and tastes.

Track the effectiveness of individual marketing activities

Robust customer engagement requires an in-depth knowledge of all angles of a sale. This is why conversion attribution forms an important part of successful multi-channel marketing.

Analytics provide businesses with details of their customers’ behavior, but attribution gives insights into the effectiveness of different marketing activities.

In a blog post by Google, we are encouraged to “think of attribution as the peanut butter to analytics’ jelly. Yes, each is great on its own, but for many, they’re even better together.”

What exactly is attribution?

Attribution - also known as conversion attribution - involves identifying a set of user actions that lead to a specific outcome and assigning a value to each of those actions. By attaching a different weight to each action, marketers can better understand the behavior patterns that lead to a purchase.

It’s important for two key reasons:

1. It helps brands track their marketing spend and identify the campaigns and activities that have the biggest impact on customers and their business
2. It allows marketers to pump attribution data into future efforts. This leads to increasingly tailored brand experiences that are enjoyable for customers

It is incredibly powerful for a brand to access the most recent information from a visitor and use that data to nudge them to take the next right action. 

As marketing channels continue to multiply and evolve, it gets harder to clearly identify attribution. And, as most consumers use multiple devices and an increasing number of channels - including forms of dark traffic that is impossible to track - it’s harder than ever to assign accurate value to every single touchpoint. 

Resulticks tackles the problem by tracking conversion attribution at a segment-of-one level across touchpoints. The AI-powered technology helps deliver measurable results, actionable insights that help focus future efforts, and overall improved campaign performance.