What is Click-Through Attribution?
Click-Through Attribution is one of the Key Performance Indicators (KPI), to measure the marketing efforts, that links user actions, specifically clicking on an ad, to subsequent conversions or desired outcomes on a website. It enables marketers to evaluate the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns by attributing conversions to the initial ad click. In this model, your retargeting campaign takes credit for a conversion after a user and an ad show up on the same page, the user clicks the ad, and they eventually make a purchase.
What types of attribution models are there?
The most common click attribution models are first-click attribution, last-click attribution and linear attribution. There can be many variations of attribution models such as Time Decay Attribution, Position-Based Attribution etc, these models assign different values based on the type of transaction and channels involved.
First-click attribution:
First-click attribution is an attribution model that assigns 100% of the credit for a sale to the first channel that a user clicked through. For Example If a customer visits your website for the first time after clicking on a Facebook ad, and they make a purchase after clicking through an email, 100% of the credit for that sale would go to Facebook. So if you sold a Product, Facebook would get the full credit for that Product sale.
Last-click attribution:
Last-click attribution is a model that assigns 100% of the credit for a sale to the last known channel that a user clicked through. For Example Going back to our previous example, If that same customer clicks on a Facebook ad, lands on your website, leaves, and then comes back to make a purchase after clicking through an email, 100% of the credit for the Product sale would be applied to email.
Linear Attribution:
Linear attribution breaks the credit for a sale or action into equal parts pending how many touchpoints (places where a customer has interacted with your brand or any of its content in some way) were measured in the course of the customer’s purchase journey. If the customer had four marketing channel interactions that ultimately resulted in a sale, each channel would be assigned an equal credit for the sale (25% in this case)
How do I track these clicks?
To track click through attribution, you can use UTM parameters to track the source, medium, and campaign information for each click on a link. You can add these parameters to the end of your URL, and then analyze your website traffic data in Google Analytics to see where visitors are coming from and how they interact with your website.
