Touches, journeys, and attribution

Marketing Analytics in Tableau

Mariam Ibrahim

Managing Data Analyst, IBM

Journeys and sessions

Journey - chronological flow of interactions

Journeys and sessions

Journey - ends with a purchase

Journeys and sessions

Journey - made up of five sessions

Channels and marketing goals

A journey of 8 touches, taking 28 days, featuring paid search and paid social touches

Brand awareness: making sure people know about your company and its product/services

A legend identifying the channel of each touch in the journey

Marketing by journey stage

An example journey starting with paid social and paid search marketing (e.g. brand awareness tactics)

A legend defining the organic channel as a type of marketing where web traffic "naturally" arrives at a site (as opposed to via a paid channel)

Marketing attribution

How do we assign success metrics?
How do they compare one channel's performance to another's?

This is the challenge of marketing attribution

Marketing attribution: the process of identifying each touch point and then assigning value to each point based on how it contributed to the ultimate goal

Marketing attribution models

First-touch attribution: assigning all value to the first touch

A visual representation of first-touch attribution

Last-touch attribution: assigning all value to the last touch

A visual representation of last-touch attribution

Multi-touch attribution: credit split evenly across all touches

A visual representation of multi-touch attribution with credit evenly split among all touches

Multi-touch attribution: credit calculated using algorithms

A visual representation of multi-touch attribution with credit assigned uniquely to each touch based on an algorithm

Let's practice!

Marketing Analytics in Tableau