Think of multi-touch attribution (MTA) like a detective on a crime spree mystery – only rather than determining who’s behind the crime, you’re determining which marketing activity is driving the conversions. MTA tracks all the interactions a lead has with your business before they purchase, so you can see what’s working and what’s just burning your money.
An alternative? Linear lead attribution splits credit evenly among all touchpoints (simple but does not attribute impact proportionally).
One click isn’t the whole story
- 94% of marketers say that multi-touch attribution helps them to allocate their budget better.
- Companies using MTA see a 20% greater ROI than those founded on single-touch models.
- 70% of CMOs report MTA helps them prove marketing’s impact on leadership.
- B2B brands using MTA are 40% more efficient with ad spend than last-touch models.
The hard truth
Attribution is never perfect, but I’ve learned it’s better to focus on trends than obsess over exact numbers. Multi-touch attribution reveals the moments where trust is built.
Let’s be honest about attribution models – they’re always going to be approximations rather than perfect reflections of complex customer journeys. The real value isn’t in pursuing elusive 100% accuracy but in recognizing the patterns and trends that emerge consistently across your data.
Rather than getting bogged down in attribution perfectionism (which can become a resource-draining rabbit hole), successful teams establish reasonable measurement frameworks that capture enough reality to inform intelligent marketing investments while acknowledging the inevitable blind spots.
Let’s see who’s winning with MTA
A retail company partnered with Lifesight to onboard MTA and attained 40% quarterly revenue growth by investing ad spend in the most converting touchpoints. They established that email campaigns and Google Ads drove the most conversions and cut spending on underperforming channels, driving efficiency. They used predictive modeling to optimize their marketing mix further.
Another example is an auto brand that leveraged MTA to learn more about its customers’ behavior across numerous touchpoints. This lifted marketing ROI by 30%. The brand invested more budget in high-performing touchpoints like social media retargeting.
Watch this space
Challenge:
MTA is great unless you remember that customers switch devices and channels constantly. These are tricky to monitor.
Resolution:
Implement a unified customer data platform (CDP). A CDP collects, organizes, and combines customer data from all touchpoints. Companies using CDPs notice an increase in marketing effectiveness of 25%.
Making MTA work
- Are you optimizing for sales, engagement, or leads? Each one of them uses a different attribution model.
- Based on your business needs, you can choose position-based, time decay, or data-driven attribution.
- Regularly refine your strategy based on data insights.
