Our November event was part 1 of a loose 2-part series (with part 2 coming in January, because not even attribution will get in the way of our annual holiday event in December!). For our November event, Jason Packer of Quantable walked through the basics of marketing channel attribution.

“Basics” undersells the content a bit. Among other aspects of the subject that Jason covered:

• How “attribution” questions often really turn out to be (cross-device / cross-session) user identification questions
• How even imperfect efforts at attribution (which all attribution will be) is still better than no attribution
• That “last click” is attribution… but it’s the form of attribution that is perhaps the closest to no attribution and the farthest from perfect attribution
• The two fundamental approaches to attribution: heuristic (the “pick your weighting” approach offered in the free version of Google Analytics) and data-driven, or algorithmic (if you’re working with Shapley values or Markov chains, then you’re in the data-drive world of attribution)
• That not all heuristic approaches are created equally, including an explanation as to why some make more intuitive sense than others

See the full slide deck below:

Or, check out a video of Jason’s presentation courtesy of Mixt Media:

Some links for further reading:

• Assisted conversions explained (by Jason)
• Markov Chains for Attribution
• Shapley and Markov models compared using R
• Markov explained visually
• Shapley explained