Marketing Attribution Tools and Google Analytics in 2020
By: Bilal Kamal Topic: Google Analytics More Post About Content Marketing, Blogging, SEO, etc
The most common question (and the source of confusion) from new customers is "How do Google Analytics and its attribution model differ from marketing attribution tools such as PixelMe?"
Google Analytics (GA) has been a long-standing leader in the world of web analytics and has introduced seven different attribution models since 2018 in addition to the default final interaction model. So, how do they help your business, and why do you need a separate marketing attribution tool?
We will analyze everything below and compare what you can do with Google Analytics and its attribution modeling, compared to other solutions such as customer attribution platforms.
What is Marketing Attribution?
Differences between Google Analytics attribution modeling and PixelMe
Feature Comparison: Google Analytics and PixelMe
What to look for in a marketing attribution tool
By the end of this article, be an expert on Google Analytics' main conversion tracking service, how it differs from the attribution features provided by PixelMe, and why both tools make you a more powerful marketer. You.
What is Marketing Attribution?]
Marketing attribution allows you to determine which marketing channels and touchpoints contribute to your conversions.
This is done using an attribution model. An attribution model is a set of rules that assigns credit to each touchpoint along the way to a customer's conversion.
It can help answer questions such as:
What is the ROI of Facebook Ads and Google Ads?
What are the most common conversion paths and lengths?
は Which organic and paid marketing activities are most effective?
When thinking of marketing attribution as a basketball game, most marketers tend to focus on scorers. Similarly, channels that directly drive conversions. But this means missing a lot of data. This is because, on average, 5-7 touchpoints are required before conversion, as each team has multiple players to assist in play.
That ’s why marketing attribution is important to get a complete picture of all the channels that will lead your team to victory.
Google Analytics Attribution
What is Google Analytics?
First and foremost, Google Analytics is a powerful and free web analytics solution used by more than 27 million websites worldwide (and probably all the customers we talked to).
Add tracking scripts to your web pages to get real-time reports and insights about your website visitors in different dimensions.
Target audience: How many new and returning visitors? Access average sessions per user, average session duration, bounce rate, aggregated demographics and interests, cross-device usage, and more.
Acquisition Source: Where did the visitor come from? Get a breakdown of traffic sources based on referrer URL and UTM parameters. You can also connect a Google Ads account (to track PPC campaigns) with Google Search Console (to monitor organic search performance).
Action: How do people get involved in your site? It shows the pages visited by the user, the average time spent on the entire home page, how the user navigates through the site, site speed between browsers, site search keywords, and more.
Conversion: How many users convert? Here is a high-level attribution report. Track conversions based on the goals you create. This goal is fed into e-commerce tracking (collecting specific transaction data), multi-channel (analyzing customer conversion paths), and attribution (comparing conversions with different models).
You can create many other custom filters and reports but focus on attributes. Let's take a closer look at what conversion reports provide in terms of attribute tools.
Issues solved by Google Analytics attribution modeling
If you are looking for simple conversion tracking insights, there are three key features and insights that Google Analytics attribution modeling can find from your conversion reports.
Note: By default, the lookback window for identifying conversions is 30 days. From the top of each report, you can select a 1-90 day window and conversion type.
1. Compare different attribution models: The model comparison tool allows you to view up to three different attribution models side by side. This allows you to compare how each channel contributes to different stages of the marketing funnel.
For example, you can compare three models to answer different marketing questions:
First interaction: How do customers know first about us?
Last indirect click: What channel did users last visit before converting?
Linear: Which Channels Contribute to People's Decisions Before Conversion?
2. Show top conversion paths: Multi-channel shows an overview of the most common paths to conversion. This helps to prioritize key channels.
In this example, you can see that both Direct and Organic —> Direct are in the top five paths.
3. Check the time required for conversion. In multi-channel, a time lag report is also displayed, providing insight into the average time of the conversion cycle.
The time lag is the number of days between the first interaction and the conversion. So, in this example, 73% of visitors convert on the same day, 3% of visitors convert after 1 day, and 9% of visitors convert on 12-30 days.
Available attribution models.
When it comes to attribution models, it's important to have a variety of models to choose from and get a complete picture of your customer journey.
Google Analytics currently offers the following eight attribution models:
Last Interaction (default): In this model, the last touchpoint (specifically, the direct channel, or website) gets 100% of the conversion credit.
Last non-direct click: This model assigns 100% credit to the last channel that the visitor clicked before conversion (ignores direct traffic).
Google Ads Last Click: This model provides all credits for conversions to Google Ads clicks.
First interaction: This model allocates 100% credit to the first interaction that leads to a conversion.
Linear: This model gives each touchpoint in the visitor's path to the conversion an equal credit for the conversion.
Attenuation: This model assigns most credits to the closest touchpoint at the time of the conversion event. Therefore, the first touch point has the least credits and the last touchpoint has the highest credits.
Location-based: This model gives 40% of the credit to the first and last touchpoints, and distributes the remaining 20% evenly to the touchpoints in between.
Custom model: This model allows you to specify a rule and create a custom model based on a set of assumptions to analyze from the conversion.
Finally, let's cover what you need to set up your Google Analytics attribution model.
Set up attribution modeling for Google Analytics.
To use the attribution model, your site has some prerequisites.
Tracking script: A JavaScript code snippet that can be added to every web page to track people's movements or specific actions within the site.
Goal: A measure defined to measure the actions taken by a user on a site, such as signing up. A conversion is counted each time someone meets the criteria set in the goal.
UTM tracking: Links must be tagged with UTM parameters to properly attribute conversions from organic channels and other non-Google advertising platforms.
Google Ads Integration: If you are running Google Ads, you can connect your account and get deeper insights on Google Ads conversion.
Let's take a look at how Google Analytics attribution modeling compares to customer attribution platforms such as PixelMe.
PixelMe attribution method
What is PixelMe?
PixelMe is the first customer attribution platform that integrates all marketing data. As a result, you can attribute every marketing activity, track ROI, view customer journeys, and optimize your investment.
Combine website visitors, conversions, costs, and revenue into all marketing channels and campaigns. Therefore, you can automatically measure your true ROI and make powerful marketing decisions to achieve your KPIs.
PixelMe solved issues
In the words of CTO Jérémie Doucy, "Like Batman has no superpowers. Superpowers are not needed to calculate indicators such as CPC and ROI. We need the truth, and PixelMe loves the truth."
Here are four important issues to solve:
Centralized marketing activities: Simplify the setup and integration of multi-channel marketing data. No more wasting time manually manipulating multiple spreadsheets.
Track customer journeys: See all customer journeys and all touchpoints leading to conversions, including user-level details.
Actionable insights: Attribution modeling is complex, but all paid and organic conversions can be easily analyzed via UTM.
Therefore, there is practical data on how to allocate the budget.
Reliable, unbiased data: We believe in attribution that provides real data and context about our customers. Brings truth and order to a mixed marketing world of inconsistent and non-standardized data between channels and advertising platforms.
Available attribution models
Currently, we offer three core attribution models that can be easily switched at the top of the dashboard. You can also set up a custom attribution window. This is the period during which you can request a conversion from a marketing touchpoint.
First Touch Attribution: This model gives 100% credit to the first touchpoint that leads a visitor to your website.
Last Touch Attribution: This model assigns 100% credit to the last touchpoint where a visitor converted.
Multi-touch attribution: This linear model allocates credit equally to all touchpoints along the customer's conversion path. Thus, if a user clicks on Google Ads, then clicks on Facebook Ads, and finally visits the blog and then converts, Google, Facebook, and the blog each get 33.3% credit.
Comparison of marketing attributes and web analytics functions
Having outlined both Google Analytics attribution modeling and attribution solutions such as PixelMe and key use cases, what are the key differences?
Difference between Google Analytics and Marketing Attribution Tool
If Google Analytics and PixelMe were different basketball teams, there are three important differences:
1. Key KPIs
Conversions become MVP star players with Google Analytics attribution modeling.
PixelMe turns marketing ROI into MVP. This is ultimately important for marketing efforts and is why customers invest in alternative attribution solutions.
2. Customer journey
Google Analytics shows the top conversion paths for your entire site. However, it does not provide user-level data or ROI, ROAS, or LTV tracking. So we don't know which path will lead to the best ROI.
PixelMe shows each touchpoint leading to a conversion and allows you to drill down into individual user paths. So, in addition to the aggregated conversion path (coming soon), you'll know who's on the team roster and the individual stories that led them to the team.
3. Integration
Google Analytics has no integration other than Google-specific products such as Google Ads.
PixelMe integrates with multiple tools throughout the marketing suite, including advertising platforms (Facebook and Google), revenue data (Stripe, Recurly, PayPal coming soon), and CRM tools (HubSpot and Salesforce coming soon). We are a more open team.
In a nutshell, Google Analytics allows you to view different attribution models, but ultimately gives you a complete picture of your ROI, channel effectiveness, and customer journey.
Google Analytics is a very robust platform for analyzing web traffic. Therefore, it is recommended that you take advantage of all web analytics reports and take snapshots of traffic and conversion sources as you do with PixelMe.
However, a complete marketing attribute solution is the best way to gain deeper insights that can help you make marketing decisions about where to invest your budget.
What to look for in the attribution tool
For marketing attribution tools, the following are questions to determine key factors and when needed, and the types of features to look for:
Multiple marketing channels: Do you currently use multiple marketing channels and advertising platforms?
ROI Tracking: This is the holy grail of marketing and why investing in attribution solutions. Is it easy to measure ROI, ROAS, and LTV across channels?
Track Your Customer Journey: Can You Track Your Customers' Paths And Understand Where Each Channel Fits The Journey To Customer Conversion?
Attribution models: Do you offer first-touch, multi-touch, and last-touch attribution models? This allows you to track different marketing strategies and optimize each based on your goals.
Data integration: Do you connect with the main tools of the marketing toolkit? This is important for integrating and tracking all marketing data, costs, revenue, lead details, and more.
Pricing: Of course, this depends on your budget, but it's important when comparing tools. We encourage you to sign up for a free trial or get a demo first.
Ultimately, there is no perfect analysis or attribute solution. If you delete cookies or disable JavaScript and all links are not tagged with UTM, your data may be distorted.
However, using some of the important considerations above when choosing an attribution provider, you can understand which marketing activities are most effective and how to create a strong business that brings the best customers.
By: Bilal Kamal Topic: Google Analytics More Post About Content Marketing, Blogging, SEO, etc
The most common question (and the source of confusion) from new customers is "How do Google Analytics and its attribution model differ from marketing attribution tools such as PixelMe?"
Google Analytics (GA) has been a long-standing leader in the world of web analytics and has introduced seven different attribution models since 2018 in addition to the default final interaction model. So, how do they help your business, and why do you need a separate marketing attribution tool?
We will analyze everything below and compare what you can do with Google Analytics and its attribution modeling, compared to other solutions such as customer attribution platforms.
What is Marketing Attribution?
Differences between Google Analytics attribution modeling and PixelMe
Feature Comparison: Google Analytics and PixelMe
What to look for in a marketing attribution tool
By the end of this article, be an expert on Google Analytics' main conversion tracking service, how it differs from the attribution features provided by PixelMe, and why both tools make you a more powerful marketer. You.
What is Marketing Attribution?]
Marketing attribution allows you to determine which marketing channels and touchpoints contribute to your conversions.
This is done using an attribution model. An attribution model is a set of rules that assigns credit to each touchpoint along the way to a customer's conversion.
It can help answer questions such as:
What is the ROI of Facebook Ads and Google Ads?
What are the most common conversion paths and lengths?
は Which organic and paid marketing activities are most effective?
When thinking of marketing attribution as a basketball game, most marketers tend to focus on scorers. Similarly, channels that directly drive conversions. But this means missing a lot of data. This is because, on average, 5-7 touchpoints are required before conversion, as each team has multiple players to assist in play.
That ’s why marketing attribution is important to get a complete picture of all the channels that will lead your team to victory.
Google Analytics Attribution
What is Google Analytics?
First and foremost, Google Analytics is a powerful and free web analytics solution used by more than 27 million websites worldwide (and probably all the customers we talked to).
Add tracking scripts to your web pages to get real-time reports and insights about your website visitors in different dimensions.
Target audience: How many new and returning visitors? Access average sessions per user, average session duration, bounce rate, aggregated demographics and interests, cross-device usage, and more.
Acquisition Source: Where did the visitor come from? Get a breakdown of traffic sources based on referrer URL and UTM parameters. You can also connect a Google Ads account (to track PPC campaigns) with Google Search Console (to monitor organic search performance).
Action: How do people get involved in your site? It shows the pages visited by the user, the average time spent on the entire home page, how the user navigates through the site, site speed between browsers, site search keywords, and more.
Conversion: How many users convert? Here is a high-level attribution report. Track conversions based on the goals you create. This goal is fed into e-commerce tracking (collecting specific transaction data), multi-channel (analyzing customer conversion paths), and attribution (comparing conversions with different models).
You can create many other custom filters and reports but focus on attributes. Let's take a closer look at what conversion reports provide in terms of attribute tools.
Issues solved by Google Analytics attribution modeling
If you are looking for simple conversion tracking insights, there are three key features and insights that Google Analytics attribution modeling can find from your conversion reports.
Note: By default, the lookback window for identifying conversions is 30 days. From the top of each report, you can select a 1-90 day window and conversion type.
1. Compare different attribution models: The model comparison tool allows you to view up to three different attribution models side by side. This allows you to compare how each channel contributes to different stages of the marketing funnel.
For example, you can compare three models to answer different marketing questions:
First interaction: How do customers know first about us?
Last indirect click: What channel did users last visit before converting?
Linear: Which Channels Contribute to People's Decisions Before Conversion?
2. Show top conversion paths: Multi-channel shows an overview of the most common paths to conversion. This helps to prioritize key channels.
In this example, you can see that both Direct and Organic —> Direct are in the top five paths.
3. Check the time required for conversion. In multi-channel, a time lag report is also displayed, providing insight into the average time of the conversion cycle.
The time lag is the number of days between the first interaction and the conversion. So, in this example, 73% of visitors convert on the same day, 3% of visitors convert after 1 day, and 9% of visitors convert on 12-30 days.
Available attribution models.
When it comes to attribution models, it's important to have a variety of models to choose from and get a complete picture of your customer journey.
Google Analytics currently offers the following eight attribution models:
Last Interaction (default): In this model, the last touchpoint (specifically, the direct channel, or website) gets 100% of the conversion credit.
Last non-direct click: This model assigns 100% credit to the last channel that the visitor clicked before conversion (ignores direct traffic).
Google Ads Last Click: This model provides all credits for conversions to Google Ads clicks.
First interaction: This model allocates 100% credit to the first interaction that leads to a conversion.
Linear: This model gives each touchpoint in the visitor's path to the conversion an equal credit for the conversion.
Attenuation: This model assigns most credits to the closest touchpoint at the time of the conversion event. Therefore, the first touch point has the least credits and the last touchpoint has the highest credits.
Location-based: This model gives 40% of the credit to the first and last touchpoints, and distributes the remaining 20% evenly to the touchpoints in between.
Custom model: This model allows you to specify a rule and create a custom model based on a set of assumptions to analyze from the conversion.
Finally, let's cover what you need to set up your Google Analytics attribution model.
Set up attribution modeling for Google Analytics.
To use the attribution model, your site has some prerequisites.
Tracking script: A JavaScript code snippet that can be added to every web page to track people's movements or specific actions within the site.
Goal: A measure defined to measure the actions taken by a user on a site, such as signing up. A conversion is counted each time someone meets the criteria set in the goal.
UTM tracking: Links must be tagged with UTM parameters to properly attribute conversions from organic channels and other non-Google advertising platforms.
Google Ads Integration: If you are running Google Ads, you can connect your account and get deeper insights on Google Ads conversion.
Let's take a look at how Google Analytics attribution modeling compares to customer attribution platforms such as PixelMe.
PixelMe attribution method
What is PixelMe?
PixelMe is the first customer attribution platform that integrates all marketing data. As a result, you can attribute every marketing activity, track ROI, view customer journeys, and optimize your investment.
Combine website visitors, conversions, costs, and revenue into all marketing channels and campaigns. Therefore, you can automatically measure your true ROI and make powerful marketing decisions to achieve your KPIs.
PixelMe solved issues
In the words of CTO Jérémie Doucy, "Like Batman has no superpowers. Superpowers are not needed to calculate indicators such as CPC and ROI. We need the truth, and PixelMe loves the truth."
Here are four important issues to solve:
Centralized marketing activities: Simplify the setup and integration of multi-channel marketing data. No more wasting time manually manipulating multiple spreadsheets.
Track customer journeys: See all customer journeys and all touchpoints leading to conversions, including user-level details.
Actionable insights: Attribution modeling is complex, but all paid and organic conversions can be easily analyzed via UTM.
Therefore, there is practical data on how to allocate the budget.
Reliable, unbiased data: We believe in attribution that provides real data and context about our customers. Brings truth and order to a mixed marketing world of inconsistent and non-standardized data between channels and advertising platforms.
Available attribution models
Currently, we offer three core attribution models that can be easily switched at the top of the dashboard. You can also set up a custom attribution window. This is the period during which you can request a conversion from a marketing touchpoint.
First Touch Attribution: This model gives 100% credit to the first touchpoint that leads a visitor to your website.
Last Touch Attribution: This model assigns 100% credit to the last touchpoint where a visitor converted.
Multi-touch attribution: This linear model allocates credit equally to all touchpoints along the customer's conversion path. Thus, if a user clicks on Google Ads, then clicks on Facebook Ads, and finally visits the blog and then converts, Google, Facebook, and the blog each get 33.3% credit.
Comparison of marketing attributes and web analytics functions
Having outlined both Google Analytics attribution modeling and attribution solutions such as PixelMe and key use cases, what are the key differences?
Difference between Google Analytics and Marketing Attribution Tool
If Google Analytics and PixelMe were different basketball teams, there are three important differences:
1. Key KPIs
Conversions become MVP star players with Google Analytics attribution modeling.
PixelMe turns marketing ROI into MVP. This is ultimately important for marketing efforts and is why customers invest in alternative attribution solutions.
2. Customer journey
Google Analytics shows the top conversion paths for your entire site. However, it does not provide user-level data or ROI, ROAS, or LTV tracking. So we don't know which path will lead to the best ROI.
PixelMe shows each touchpoint leading to a conversion and allows you to drill down into individual user paths. So, in addition to the aggregated conversion path (coming soon), you'll know who's on the team roster and the individual stories that led them to the team.
3. Integration
Google Analytics has no integration other than Google-specific products such as Google Ads.
PixelMe integrates with multiple tools throughout the marketing suite, including advertising platforms (Facebook and Google), revenue data (Stripe, Recurly, PayPal coming soon), and CRM tools (HubSpot and Salesforce coming soon). We are a more open team.
In a nutshell, Google Analytics allows you to view different attribution models, but ultimately gives you a complete picture of your ROI, channel effectiveness, and customer journey.
Google Analytics is a very robust platform for analyzing web traffic. Therefore, it is recommended that you take advantage of all web analytics reports and take snapshots of traffic and conversion sources as you do with PixelMe.
However, a complete marketing attribute solution is the best way to gain deeper insights that can help you make marketing decisions about where to invest your budget.
What to look for in the attribution tool
For marketing attribution tools, the following are questions to determine key factors and when needed, and the types of features to look for:
Multiple marketing channels: Do you currently use multiple marketing channels and advertising platforms?
ROI Tracking: This is the holy grail of marketing and why investing in attribution solutions. Is it easy to measure ROI, ROAS, and LTV across channels?
Track Your Customer Journey: Can You Track Your Customers' Paths And Understand Where Each Channel Fits The Journey To Customer Conversion?
Attribution models: Do you offer first-touch, multi-touch, and last-touch attribution models? This allows you to track different marketing strategies and optimize each based on your goals.
Data integration: Do you connect with the main tools of the marketing toolkit? This is important for integrating and tracking all marketing data, costs, revenue, lead details, and more.
Pricing: Of course, this depends on your budget, but it's important when comparing tools. We encourage you to sign up for a free trial or get a demo first.
Ultimately, there is no perfect analysis or attribute solution. If you delete cookies or disable JavaScript and all links are not tagged with UTM, your data may be distorted.
However, using some of the important considerations above when choosing an attribution provider, you can understand which marketing activities are most effective and how to create a strong business that brings the best customers.
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