1. Touches, journeys, and attribution
Welcome back! In this video, we’ll be taking a more user-based approach to web traffic data. How do we think about interacting with a website from a user's perspective? And how does this impact how we measure our marketing?
2. Journeys and sessions
As we discussed in our previous video, one goal of many marketing campaigns is acquiring new customers. As such, many companies will organize their web traffic data in the context of a user journey, as shown here. A journey is the chronological flow of marketing and web pages the user visits.
3. Journeys and sessions
A journey ends with the goal of the marketing campaign, often the user’s purchase. The next journey will either begin after that purchase, or, if it’s a new user, begin the first time they interact with the company’s marketing.
4. Journeys and sessions
A session is an interaction, typically around 30-60 minutes of continuous engagement, that a user has with a company's website or marketing. Sessions, also called touches, make up journeys. In this visual, each of the five blocks is a distinct session.
5. Channels and marketing goals
Each touch occurs via a specific channel: a medium or a platform that a business uses to reach their target audience. For example, paying a social media company to run ads for your business and target individuals with accounts based on their interests is Paid Social marketing. Paying a search engine money to appear at the top of the results for specific searches is known as Paid Search marketing.
These channels may appear at different frequencies across a user’s marketing journey based on a company’s overall strategy and marketing goals.
Brand awareness is an important goal; making sure individuals know about your company and its products or services. Paid social media is a great channel for brand awareness, as you can reach individuals with interests and activity that are a match for your business.
6. Marketing by journey stage
As a result, typically early parts of the journey, like a first touch, have channels that correspond to brand awareness marketing. Once an individual learns about a brand, they may simply search that brand name in a search engine later and click on the website link from the results.
They may also go directly to the website without interacting with any marketing; since this occurs “naturally”, it's within the Organic channel. As you may have guessed, later touches are more likely from the Organic channel.
7. Marketing attribution
Given these different parts of a user journey: learning about a brand, exploring its options, and ultimately making a purchase; it makes sense different channels and strategies occur across each journey. So how do we assign success metrics? Or compare one channel’s performance to another?
This can get very difficult, and is a challenge faced known as marketing attribution. Marketing attribution is the process of identifying each touch point and then assigning value to each one based on how it contributed to the ultimate goal.
8. Marketing attribution models
Many teams use:
first touch attribution: assigning all value to the channel of the first touch in a journey,
or
last touch attribution: assigning all the value to the channel of the last touch in a journey.
Recently, multi-touch attribution models have become more popular, where credit is split across multiple touches in a journey. This could be done by either:
assigning equal credit to each touch
or
assigning different values to each touch based on designated rules or using an algorithm; a more advanced approach becoming more popular with the growth of artificial intelligence.
9. Let's practice!
Now that you've learned about the touches that make up marketing journeys, let's practice with some data!