How to use the multi touch attribution manager

What is attribution?

Attribution basically means: If you have a conversion to connect it to a winning touchpoint. In other words: A sale will be attributed to a click.

In single attribution this means: If you have more than one touchpoint, the winning one will be chosen.

In multi touch attribution this means: If you have more than one touchpoint, the winning ones will be chosen.

The result: data of conversion + data of touchpoint(s)

Every conversion has data attached to it, like products purchased, an order id, order value, vouchers used etc. And every touchpoint also has data and meta data, like the type (click or adimpression), partner name, partner category, channel, subid, etc.

What is multi touch attribution?

Why going for multi touch attribution?

If you attribute a conversion only to one touchpoint in the customer journey, channels early in the customer journey rarely have a chance to be rewarded.

However, often there are good reasons to attribute costs or commission to multiple touch points within the customer journey.

So the idea of splitting the credit of a conversion across multiple touchpoints and channels seems fair and is a way to better reward channels like content or display that usually happen earlier in the customer journey than models like voucher that happen rather at the end of the customer journey.

So what does multi touch attribution allow to do?

Multi touch attribution means:

• More than 1 winner touchpoint of an attribution is possible (multiple winners)

• Commission is split among all winners (commission is defined per touchpoint)

• Credit for every touchpoint is calculated in percent. So a total of 100% can be splitted among touchpoints.

Conversions with multiple winning touchpoints

Every conversion consists basically of two levels:

1. Conversion information (like order id, new customer, order value etc)

2. Touchpoint information: One or multiple touchpoints are winner.

   1. Touchpoints refer to partners

   2. Commissions are paid on a touchpoint level

Go to finance > conversions and take a look at conversions. The touchpoint icon already tells, if single or multi touch attribution was applied:

Open

one winner (single attribution)

Open

multiple winners (multi touch attribution)

clicking on the touchpoint icon reveals touchpoint details like

• winning partners and ad spaces

• credits (in percent)

• commission

• visibility for partner

• …

Applied commission

Commission is applied on the touchpoint level. The formula for crediting multi touch attribution conversions is simple:

Credit x Commission (defined in the commission model)

Therefore, partners (more precise: relations with ad spaces) can have different commission models, also when working with multi touch attribution.

Activating multi touch attribution

Go to trail > settings > tracking settings and activate multi touch attribution.

The multi touch attribution manager

Go to partnerships > advertiser > manage advertisers and then open the multi touch attribution manager.

The multi-touch attribution model is a rule-based attribution model. It consists of several configuration properties and a set of rules. The different parts of the attribution model are explained in the following.

Choosing a base model

The base model is the model that is used to distribute credits among touch points based on their position, independent of individual properties of a touch point.

Linear: Each touchpoint receives the same share of credits. The credit is split among all touchpoints.

Time decay: The closer the touchpoint is to the conversion, the more credit it receives.

Maximum Winner Count

If every touch point can receive credit, you want to avoid to give credit to a large number of touchpoints. After all, the commission will be split and if too many touchpoints were credited, the commission share may get so low, it would not make sense.

So we recommend to set a maximum count of touchpoints, that can be winners and thus get a credit. System default is 12.

Attribution Windows

The attribution window is the age or lookback window, where a touchpoint can still become a winner. In previous times (before cookieless tracking) this was also called “cookie time.”

If you want to define your attribution window, you may so so. Otherwise the default will be applied.

• default attribution window for clicks is 30 days

• default attribution window for ad impressions (views) is 0 days

Custom Rules (Attribution Model)

The custom rule defines how a total credit of 100% is distributed among touchpoints of a customer journey. The Ingenious attribution distributes the total credit by allocating parts of the total credit to particular touchpoints.

Credit is distributed by the use of functions. These functions can be freely defined in the multi touch attribution manager.

Functions

Functions allocate credits to touchpoints. Typically you will define multiple functions within an attribution model. The final credit of a touchpoint will be the combination of the results of all functions.

The Ingenious Attribution supports multiple types of functions. Each function type implements a different method of allocation.

Every function definition is provided with a hint. You can rewrite it to make every step more comprehensible.

The following table shows the different function types:

Condition Attributes

You can use the following attributes in the parameter "condition" to match touchpoints.

We have created examples of the most common attribution rules - read on here.