Attribution vs Contribution: Is Your Campaign Doing Its Job?

Say a child grew up in a family passionate about cars, and always loved Audi. As far back as they could remember, their father drove Audis, told stories about saving up for his first Audi, they admired other Audis on the road, and the child had many fond memories of road trips in their Audi. That seed of brand preference was planted, and they one day bought their own Audi.

Would it be accurate to say that the search ad they clicked on when they Googled “Audi dealership” should solely get all of the credit for that hypothetical transaction?

Of course not, there were other factors involved and a larger context to consider. That conversion was the outcome of many things preceding it.

Despite the marketing industry’s understanding of customer journeys being more complex than one or two touchpoints, the concept of conversion attribution is still hotly debated.

Products & services are even sold claiming to solve the dilemma, boasting about the ability to track down the moment you hooked the customer so you can give credit to that one referral, social post, ad, etc, for the sale, implying everything else was a waste and you should replicate the thing that worked.

If only it was that simple...

Conversion Attribution Models

There are different models of attribution, some flattering the last observable touchpoint, some flattering the first, others dividing it up in parts or using a “data-driven” (aka black box) method. Depending on which model you use, your data can tell different stories leading to very different conclusions.

You can then see why, depending on who is telling the story, that the motive could dictate which attribution model they use.

The problem with that way of thinking is that it’s an oversimplification. Attribution is biased & misleading at best, and at worst, is straight up boasting about being inaccurate.

A different way to look at it, which won’t send you down a rabbit hole of futility, is by thinking in terms of “contribution” instead of “attribution”. Contribution leaves room for a broader conversation, rather than obsessing with tweezers trying to assign credit to individual touchpoints.

Any experienced marketer will have faced the classic scenario where a boss/client asks to see a list of all campaigns and how many conversions are attributed to each one, then declares they should cut those campaigns which aren’t standout solo performers. It’s akin to someone looking at the stat line of a football game, noticing that the receivers scored the most touchdowns, and concluding every other position is expendable.

That’s a simple misunderstanding of how marketing funnels work, a concept which hasn’t gone away just because conversion tracking isn’t perfectly airtight.

Evaluating Campaign Performance In Context

A more constructive approach is to take a step back and monitor the overall trends when adding campaigns into your mix, knowing that campaigns contribute in specific ways. Sticking with the football analogy; offensive linemen don’t get judged by how many touchdowns they score, their job is to help others do that without even touching the ball themselves. If you were to take them away on the logic that they don’t score touchdowns, your team would score fewer touchdowns. You don’t keep the overall performance by taking out a key contributor.

Think of your ad campaigns like you would a team sport; they shouldn’t compete against each other, they should work together to achieve your desired outcome.

Some people might balk at the idea and say that’s a copout in defense of wasteful campaigns, however that’s not actually how it plays out when you broaden your scope and consider how different campaigns work together.

How marketers speak about those campaigns is part of the problem, deflecting or absolving them of criticism when they don’t perform in the same way as other campaigns. Some may say things like:

“The upper-funnel campaign we introduced didn’t generate many leads, but that’s to be expected. The search campaigns did well this month though.”

That’s washing your hands of the issue. Instead, evaluate in context, and watch the insights emerge:

“The search campaigns are low-funnel, so naturally they stand out in terms of conversion rate and CPA. After we added this upper-funnel social campaign into the mix, the search campaigns showed even more volume, so it’s apparent that the upper-funnel campaign had an effect on them. Therefore, even though it doesn’t directly show as many reported conversions itself, it did its job setting up the search campaigns for success, and contributed to overall results.”

The difference is that the second approach was holistic, recognizing the value of a campaign which didn’t score the points itself but evidently caused a trend. It’s like watching game tape and noticing how the blockers made room for the receiver instead of only looking at the ball crossing the goal line.

So What?

There absolutely could also be some elements not carrying their weight in your marketing funnel, so the takeaway here is not to leave everything running even when they aren’t contributing. We understand budgets are finite and we don’t recommend running campaigns that aren’t pulling on the chain in any observable way, so we want to know their job in context and analyze accordingly.

The old saying “don’t judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree” somewhat applies when evaluating campaign performance, though we aren’t claiming that some ads or campaign types are incapable of driving a conversion on their own.

In Meta Ads, for example, you can run a campaign with the express purpose of reaching as many people as possible (eg. optimized for awareness) and not immediate conversion (eg. optimized for leads), and still see conversions directly attributed to it. Someone in the targeted audience of a soft-sell ad might see it at just the right moment and that’s all the convincing they needed to click the ad and submit a lead.

However, the point is: that’s not its main job, so that’s not how you should evaluate that campaign’s success, you should instead look at the incremental effect it had on other channels.

In other words, you’re looking at how it contributed to your overall success.

Making sense of data and performance reports is hard, we get it! Especially when using multiple platforms and trying to get all of the data to play nice together. But that’s just one way we help organizations of different sizes use data to their advantage. We take the time to have conversations about trends and long term goals, not just run random ads or auto-generated campaigns and cross our fingers hoping for noticeable results.

Maybe you didn’t have the right playbook in the past, or made cuts at the wrong positions, so to that, we say “put me in, coach!”

If it’s time you had an experienced agency contributing to your success, get in touch with us.