If you are working with a paid ads marketing agency, make sure they are explaining how ad attribution works. And if they aren’t? Ask!
While it may be one of the most complicated parts about investing in paid ads, this is where your results may be looking inflated.
Firstly, what is attribution?
Attribution is the way the advertising platform is reporting on results within their platforms. It’s the way they claim credit for the touchpoint someone has had with their ad before making a purchase.
Let’s explain with an example.
You have just gone out for coffee with a friend and they mentioned they bought new, super soft bed sheets from X brand and would highly recommend them. You go home and Google the brand name, go directly to their website and browse all of their beautiful bed linen.
The next time you log in to Instagram, you’re getting targeted with the exact same olive green bed linen you were looking at earlier that day. You click on the Instagram ad, and you go back to that product listing. This time? You read all of their 5-star reviews and think, ‘my bed would look great with that linen’, so you add it to your cart.
Your partner walks in from work, so you stop what you’re doing and debrief the day with them over a cuppa. A few hours later, they mention if you had received the email they forwarded to you at lunchtime, so you open your emails and realise you’ve also got an abandoned cart email sitting there. You guessed it – that olive green bed linen is waiting patiently in your cart waiting for you to checkout. But the brand has been sneaky, and given you a 10% discount if you complete your purchase within the next 24 hours.
At breakfast the next morning, you bring it up with your partner to get their opinion on the colour and they love it. Beauty – it’s time to finally checkout.
You’re finishing up your coffee and Google the business while you’re browsing. You see their Google Ad show as the first search result and click on the Google Ad to go to their website, just to suss out whether their 10% off discount you’ve received is their best offer. No luck – still 10% off for first-time customers there too.
Your partner gives you a kiss goodbye, and you notice the time for work. Phone’s clicked off and you’re rushing out the door to make it in time for your train that leaves soon. Managing to catch one of the only seats left on the train, you open up your phone to see a text from your friend you had coffee with earlier that week.
They’re texting to check in with how things are going and were thinking of you as they were hanging out the washing [which, by the way, the new bed sheets are in]. Ah yes, the subtle reminder. You think, ‘okay that’s it, I have a spare 5mins now on the train – it’s now or never’.
You open back up the email you were sent and use their link with the 10% discount. It sends you straight back to your cart to complete your purchase.
The way this looks inside of Ads Manager is that your Google Ads, Facebook Ads and email marketing campaign ALL attribute the sale. All of the advertising platforms want you to know that they had a little bit of a say in that final sale happening.
The key here is that it has to have happened within the attribution window that you’ve selected for your different campaigns. However, the difficult part – and the part that makes things super tricky – is that every single platform has a different attribution window options.
For example, Facebook Ads has a default window of 7-day click and 1-day view. This means that if you make a purchase within 7-days of clicking the ad or within 1-day of simply viewing the ad [not even clicking], then the sale will be attributed to that platform.
Some platforms, like Google Ads, allow much larger attribution windows like 90-days or more. This is great for high-ticket priced items that may take customers a longer time to decide whether they want to invest or not. Other attribution models, such as data-driven attribution, also allows the platform to distribute the weight of the sale between multiple clicks that may happen before the purchase occurs.
All of this to say, attribution is complicated.
But your marketing agency needs to understand how it works, and be communicating it often to you in strategy calls or reports, so that you can recognise what platforms are actually driving the most results for your business.
In a world of multichannel marketing and people needing multiple touchpoints with your band prior to purchasing, it is unrealistic to think that only one platform was the reason someone purchased.
Instead of giving all of the credit to one platform, we need to frame the way we report on results as, ‘X platform contributed to X purchases happening’. Because in the [very likely] example above, the purchase may have even happened because they had a conversation with a friend initially.
If you’re looking to partner with an agency that dives deep into the data to unpack which platforms are contributing to your revenue the most, we’d love to chat with you!
