Multi-touch marketing attribution is a way to give conversion credit towards touchpoints that influenced the final conversion throughout the marketing funnel. Multi-touch attribution models look at an entire sequence of events a visitor has with your website to better allocate conversion credit.
Multi-Touch attribution is very useful for marketers to get a better understanding of how users are interacting with different channels and assessing how many touchpoints is ideal for a user before ultimately converting on your site.
In this tutorial, learn how to track multi-touch marketing attribution report in HubSpot.
What is Marketing Attribution?
Marketing attribution has increasingly become a must-have strategy for marketing teams who want to better track their performance and influence. There are several different models of marketing attribution:
- First-Touch: Refers to the first channel that a user interacted with before converting on your site. It is also known as first-click and first-interaction.
- Last-Touch: Refers to the last channel that a user interacted with before converting with your product/business.
- Multi-Touch: Assess the value of each touchpoint leading to conversion.
- Linear: A linear attribution model is the simplest form of multi-touch attribution as it gives conversion credit evenly across each touchpoint in the journey, no matter the stage.
- Time Decay: Like a linear model, time decay gives conversion credit throughout the journey. However, a time decay model gives more credit to the touchpoints closest the the ultimate conversion. For instance, a final email that led to a purchase is given more conversion credit then an organic search.
- Position Based: This is a hybrid between First-Touch and Last-Touch attribution models, where the first and last channel each get 40% of the credit, and the touches in between split the remaining 20%.
What is Multi-Touch Marketing Attribution?
As aforementioned, Multi-Touch marketing attribution gives conversion credit to each touchpoint within the customer journey before the final conversion (purchase, trial sign up, etc.).
An example of a Multi-Touch marketing attribution model can be understood through the following example:
- Meg searches for shoes on Google and clicks through a search result for shoes.com. She browses a few sites and finds a pair of shoes but doesn’t buy them.
- She continues searching online and finds a fashion blog that mentions the shoes and clicks through to shoes.com. Still not ready to buy, she hovers over to the exit box and sees a pop-up for 15% if you sign up for the newsletter. She signs up for the newsletter.
- A few days later Meg gets an email from shoes.com and clicks through from the email and buys the shoes.
With a Multi-Touch marketing attribution model, each touchpoint—organic search, referral and email—is credited for the conversion.
How to Track Multi-Touch Attribution in HubSpot
HubSpot allows users to create attribute reports within the marketing automation platform. To create a Multi-Touch attribution report in HubSpot, follow these steps:
- In HubSpot, go to Reports > Reports Home
- Click the ‘Create a new report’ button
- A pop-up modal will appear prompting you to choose a report type. Choose Attribution Report
- While HubSpot will give you a few options of attribution report types, let’s choose Start from Scratch, then click Create Report
- Start building your report by choosing a group of contact to report on, a conversion type and time period, interacting score or source (in our case, All Sessions)
- Save your report
- On the next page, be sure to title your report
- View and share your report
Conclusion
A Multi-Touch marketing attribution model is a valuable way for marketers who are singularly focused on driving conversions and want to learn more about where to optimize their campaigns.