With Attribution becoming fundamental in driving maximal return on investment and more and more significant in marketing measurement and optimisation, it is important to understand how to get the best insights from the data. This article will briefly explain how to use some of the in-built Campaign Manager attribution reports to gain insightful media performance and trends. Always remember to configure the reports with the appropriate settings (date range, conversion type, Path Length).
Top Conversion Paths Report
The ‘Conversion Path’ report shows you all the media touchpoints users had on their paths to conversion. You can split it by the dimension you want to look at: channel, site, campaign, placement, etc.
The kind of insights you can get from the ‘Top Conversion Paths Report’ can be classified in three different groups:
1. Path position: The user journey helps you to find where your channels and campaigns are used in the conversion funnel. Based on these insights, you can tailor your creative messaging to the user’s stage in the funnel, and also inform cross-channel sequential messaging.
2. Frequency cap: This report also reveals the optimal frequency caps for campaigns, placements, IO’s, etc., as it tells you how many interactions with a specified dimension your audience are having prior to conversion. It’s particularly useful for display activity. For this analysis however, you will need to export the data in the report and manipulate the data outside CM.
3. Contributions: This report also exposes the volume of converting paths each channel took part in, i.e. contributed to. This can be particularly useful for your Paid Social activity and upper and mid-funnel activity.
Campaign Manager Time Lag Report
The Time Lag report exposes the time (in number of days) from a user’s first interaction to conversion, in other words, the consideration period for conversions on your site. It can help inform recency buckets within which to remarket users in an effective and efficient way. For example, if you only have one remarketing bucket, but by using the time lag report you can see that your customers are converting at different times, you should then consider a more granular breakout of your recency bucket. In other words, capping the recency and frequency of remarketing ads served can help avoid ad fatigue and minimise CPA. It can also show you if there is any sort of seasonality users tend to follow when converting.
Attribution Modelling Tool
The Attribution Modelling Tool report allows you to compare performance based on up to 3 attribution models. For example, you could compare the difference in conversions attributed to Paid Search based on the default Floodlight model vs. the Data-Driven Attribution Model, or DDAM. You can choose to look at attributed conversions or revenue. This report can allow you to make some considerations on budget shift: for example, if you see that Display is performing way better by using a DDA Model than a last click one compared to Search, you may consider to move some budget from Search to the Display channel.
These are only a few of the useful, and often surprising, insights you can get into your different media strategies with CM’s in-built attribution functionalities - to read more on some of the incredible results you can get by using attribution in your Google Marketing Platforms, check these two case studies on the Data-Driven Attribution Model and the Custom Attribution Model.
If you would like to know more and/or you haven’t incorporated Attribution into your media measurement yet, reach out to the team!
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