ClickEquations Blog
A Weblog on Paid Search Marketing, Search Analytics, and Online Marketing
The Crazy World of Revenue Attribution
Revenue attribution is how you (or the software tracking your online marketing activities) decides where to place the credit for the sales that occur on your website.
If someone who has never been to your website before does a paid search, clicks an ad caused by a keyword you bought, then makes a purchase, the attribution is easy. They keyword that you paid for to get the click, should get credit for the revenue generated by the purchase.
But very often, this is not the scenario that leads to conversions which take place on your site.
- People come multiple times before purchasing.
- They often come from different sources each time the come, occasionally repeating sources along the way.
- They sometimes make a series of purchases, either after all of their visits or interlaced among their visits.
These are just a small sampling of the issues and don’t begin to define or describe the complexities.
And this is not the post where I’ll try to do either. (Those will come.)
But was we work to sort out the right way to handle revenue attribution within ClickEquations, we’re capturing some data that I thought it would be interesting to share.
The following images document real-life ‘click-chains’ – sequences of visits to a website with resulting or intersperced conversions. They are a tiny tiny fraction of the sequences found in one account in a 30 day period.
- Rows with green ‘P’ cells are visits that came from paid search keyword clicks.
- Rows with white ‘N’ cells are visits from organic search, email, affiliate links or other sources.
- Rows with yellow ‘C’ cells are conversion events.
- The number in the first column represents the visit number for that person over all time.
- Only visits within a 30 day window are included although the visit count may have begun far earlier.
And if you’re into this kind of thing, they’re very interesting.
Click-Chain Histories
#1 – Our first contestant is a frequent visitor (note we’re starting with visit 37), loves those paid search ads, but does buy at least occasionally.
Four more after the jump (as they say)
Attribution Question For You
The issue of how to allocate credit across the different searches (or other visit types) that lead up to a conversion event is a deservedly hot topic.
This is true largely because the broadly used ‘last click’ allocation model (where the last keyword gets 100% of the revenue credit) is really inaccurate and inadequate.
There are several other attribution models, including first click, linear, weighted, and other hybrids. The pros/cons of each are worthy of extensive discussion. That’s not the topic here however. We have a related question and would like to get some feedback.
Should the allocation of credit ever extend beyond a single conversion?
Two examples below further frame the question. In both cases, assume there is a user-defined tracking period which applies. In other words if you’ve set a ‘30-day tracking period’ in any case the look back for events would only extend back 30 days.
CASE 1
Search on KW1 –> Search on WK2 –> Conversion 1 –> Search on KW3 –> Conversion 2
Question: Should KW1 and KW2 be part of the allocation chain for Conversion 2? If so KW1 and KW2 could get partial revenue credit for both Conversion 1 and Conversion 2.
Or does Conversion 2 only allocate back to KW3?
CASE 2
Search on KW1 –> Search on KW2 –> Conversion 1 –> Conversion 2
Question: Should KW1 and KW2 be part of the allocation chain for Conversion 2?
Or should Conversion 2 be seen as an independent event (perhaps inspired by a follow on email or other interaction after Conversion 1.)
FYI, Google Adwords does allocate revenue to keywords from multiple conversions if no search happens between them.
Your Opinion?
We’d love to hear your opinion on this. Please take the survey below, and leave any other thoughts in the comments.
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