The purpose of marketing attribution is to quantify the influence each advertising impression has on a consumer’s decision to make a purchase decision, or convert. Visibility into what influences the audience, when and to what extent, allows marketers to optimize media spend for conversions and compare the value of different marketing channels, including paid and organic search, email, affiliate marketing, display ads, social media and more. Understanding the entire conversion path across the whole marketing mix diminishes the accuracy challenge of analyzing data from siloed channels. Typically, attribution data is used by marketers to plan future ad campaigns and inform the performance of previous campaigns by analyzing which media placements (ads) were the most cost-effective and influential as determined by metrics such as return on ad spend (ROAS) or cost per lead (CPL).
