Individual Conversion Attribution
Efficiency Boost for Your Online Campaigns
Quisma, 2013
1. Introduction

In advertising research, as well as in practice, there is widespread acknowledgement that in online marketing individual advertising channels should not be evaluated in isolation. Murat Cavus Senior Manager Marketing Intelligence Driven by increasing multimediadriven consumer behaviour, the interaction between users and brands or products takes place across several channels, creating numerous touch points with the advertising mediums. Therefore it would be shortsighted to simply evaluate the effectiveness of individual channels.
Analysing how and when consumers use respective channels during the purchasing journey allows for consideration of the “bigger picture”. This examination moves away from focusing on the individual channel and puts the customer conversion as a starting point instead. In the long run, attribution models are geared towards helping to determine the advertising channels’ contribution to a customer conversion.
While far-reaching display campaigns can be used to call attention to new products, specific search queries often appear towards the end of a decision-making process. The “last-cookie-wins” model, which is frequently employed, attributes final search queries more conversions than they realistically deserve. This is why this principle is fundamentally unsuitable for accurately evaluating marketing measures’ efficiency and effectiveness. Alternative approaches are often the most effective form of analysis and are equally important to advertisers, publishers, and agencies. Since different attribution models lead to different CPOs, every advertiser needs to ask: which model is best for my individual case?
2. Common attribution models
Conventional attribution models attribute conversions to the individual channels depending on the order of their touch points with the advertising mediums:
Last-cookie-wins model
The last-cookie-wins model attributes all conversion to the last touch point within a customer journey.
First-cookie-wins model
The first-cookie-wins model attributes all conversion to the first touch point within a customer journey.
Uniformly distributed attribution model
This model equally distributes the shares of each conversion to all touch points. If, for instance, a user was addressed at four different touch points, each touch point would get 25 percent of the conversion success.
Decreasing model
According to this model, the importance of the touch points decreases with time. The closer a touch point to a conversion, the less credit it receives. Each touch point’s importance is individually determined.
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