Attribution Models

Hi, I’m Jen, the VP of product marketing here at Bizible. Welcome to the last lesson in the 101 course series. Here, we’ll be going over what attribution models are and how you use them. So let’s get started. Different people in your marketing team may wish to focus selectively on different parts of your prospect’s marketing interactions. For instance, demand gen may want to focus on what drives people to the website but the CMO or VP may want to look at each stage in the customer’s buying journey and they’re likely to be especially interested in how these interactions contribute to growth.

In other words, different roles call for different lenses. Bizible calls these lenses attribution models and they essentially attribute a different amount of credit to different marketing interactions.

In the current lesson, we go over each of the attribution models and when you may want to use one model over the other. Before we dive into the different models, remember the different milestone touchpoint stages from the last lesson? Just to refresh your memory, they are first touch, lead creation, opportunity creation, and closed won or closed lost. Also, remember those custom intermediary touchpoints? They can be used in attribution models too. So, let’s look at the models. Two of the five stock attribution models are single touch and three are multi-touch. Single-touch models show a single marketing interaction and which outcomes it led to. While multi-touch models take more than one touch point and showed the overall impact of multiple marketing efforts on your sales cycle. The models are first touch, lead creation, U-shaped, W-shaped, and full path.

Let’s look at each one of these. The first touch model focuses on the very first interaction a prospect has with your organization. This model gives 100% of the attribution credit to the first time the prospect either lands on your webpage or someone creates a record for them in your CRM. For example, say, Kate visits bizible.com for the first time via an AdWords ad. The AdWords channel will receive 100% of the attribution credit according to the first touch model. The lead creation model gives 100% of the attribution credit to the lead creation touchpoint when a prospect provides their contact information and they become a lead. You should note that a lead creation touchpoint will also be created when someone adds a new lead record into your CRM. So continuing from the previous example, after Kate’s first visit to bizible.com via AdWords, Kate comes back the next day via a LinkedIn post to request more information. She fills out an online form providing her email. In this model, LinkedIn would receive 100% of the attribution credit. The U-shaped model focuses on both the first touch and lead creation touchpoints. In this model, the first touch and lead creation touchpoint each receives 50% of the revenue credit. For example, Kate’s first visit to bizible.com via AdWords would receive 50% of the attribution credit. The remaining 50% would be attributed to the LinkedIn post that drove Kate to fill out a form and become a lead. The W-shaped model includes three of the milestone touchpoints. In this model, the first touch, lead creation, and opportunity creation touchpoints each get 30% of the attribution credit. Intermediary touchpoints that occur between the three milestone touchpoints evenly split the remaining 10% of the credit. For example, Kate and Lindsay mentioned Bizible to their coworker Austin. While scrolling through Facebook, he sees a post from Bizible, reads about the product, and fills out a form to request a demo, resulting in an opportunity. Each of the milestone touchpoints gets 30% of the attribution credit and the intermediary touchpoints get the remaining 10%. Finally, the full path model includes all four milestone touchpoints. First touch, lead creation, opportunity creation, and closed won. Each gets 22.5% of the revenue credit and the remaining 10% is distributed equally among the intermediary touches. For example, after the demo, Lindsay, Kate, and Austin decide to pitch Bizible to their CMO Elizabeth. Elizabeth is going to the Dreamforce Conference where Bizible will be hosting a dinner event. She receives an email invitation to Bizible’s event and attends. After the dinner, she decides to purchase Bizible and becomes a customer. In this scenario, the Dreamforce dinner would receive 22.5% of the revenue credit from the closed deal. The first touch, lead creation, and opportunity touchpoints also each receive 22.5% of the credit. The intermediary touchpoints equally split the remaining 10% of the revenue credit.

So those are the five out-of-the-box attribution models. In addition to these models, you can also create custom models that use Bizible’s machine-learning algorithms to weigh each of the touchpoint stages according to the criteria of model accuracy, conversion rate, and touchpoint uniqueness weight. Check out the link on the right for more information about our machine-learning model. So that covers the basics of Bizible attribution models. Thanks for watching and don’t forget to take the final quiz.