Benefits & Limitations of Multi-Touch Attribution Model

Numerous marketers find it very hard to assess the effectiveness of each marketing channel (tactics) if there is no technology (metrics) to measure and prove the value of each marketing tactic in the sales funnel. Thankfully, multi-touch attribution models now make it possible to determine the success or failure of each marketing strategy in the sales funnel.

Benefits of Multi-Touch Attribution

If you’re still considering to adopt attribution modeling as a means to measure conversion success rate, then the following benefits and limitations of multi-touch attribution will help to mold your decision.

1. Quantifying ROI on Marketing Campaigns
   Quantifying the Return on Investment (ROI) of your sales campaigns makes it possible to know if your marketing tactics are over or undervalued. This strategy helps small-scale, medium-scale and large-scale companies to invest in marketing tactics that work and cut off those that don’t. This strategy makes it possible for marketing teams to optimize their campaigns in order to bring in more revenue for every marketing dollar spent.
2. Personalized Customer Experiences
   Multi-touch attribution (MTA) models make it possible to measure the activities of consumers in different marketing channels, track consumer’s digital footprints, and use such footprints to reach the consumer with personalized messages. Hence, attribution doesn’t only measure the conversion success rate but also improves and personalizes the consumer’s experiences.
3. Prevents Devaluation of Touchpoints
   Multi-touch attribution credits every touchpoint that contributed to conversion, thereby making it hard to devalue marketing activities that contributed to conversion but are not directly associated with conversion.

Limitations of Multi-Touch Attribution Modelling

It’s evident that multi-touch attribution (MTA) reaches customers in a more personalized fashion, but it does come with numerous challenges. Here are some of the limitations of multi-touch attribution modeling:

1. Multi-touch attribution is complicated to implement because of complicated algorithms, calculations and technology, and most of the time would require the expert knowledge or intervention of a pro-marketer or digital marketing software respectively.
2. Multi-touch attributions can sometimes give you the wrong impression that the data and information generated are reliable while they are far from the truth due to too many shortfalls such as wrong assumptions, the weight assigned to each marketing activity, and wrong analysis.
3. They are useful in understanding the performance of online marketing channels but are useless in measuring external factors such as word-of-mouth, pricing, brand equity, seasonality, competitor activities, and any other offline activities.

In all, multi-touch attributions are useful in understanding the performance of online marketing channels, but always be mindful of limitations when deriving marketing insights from them.