Online Marketing Attribution And Mix Modeling Course | Online Marketing Attribution & Mix Modeling Course

What is this course about?

In the world of digital marketing, attribution modeling and mixing models are essential to any marketing strategy. What are these terms, and why should you care? Let’s dive in and discover the answers.

What is Online Marketing Attribution?

Often, when we hear the term digital marketing, the first thing that comes to mind is online marketing. After all, that’s where the term ‘digital marketing’ originates. However, as the name implies, online marketing attribution is the study of attributing a sale of a product or service to an individual or group of individuals involved in the marketing process. In other words, attribution modeling is performed online.

There are several advantages to conducting online marketing attribution. One advantage is that you have the ability to track individual customer behaviors, and you can attribute these behaviors to marketing activities. For example, you can attribute a sale to a given piece of content or display ad, or you can even ascribe a conversion to a piece of email content (if you have implemented an email conversion pixel).

What is Mix Modeling?

When performing digital marketing attribution, it’s important to keep in mind that not all marketing activity impacts a buyer’s journey in the same way. Some activity, such as advertising, can have a more noticeable impact than others, such as SEO. To make sure you account for all of the activity that led up to a purchase, you need to use a mix modeling approach.

Also known as cross-attribution, mix modeling allows you to study the effect of all the marketing activities, including SEO, display ads, and social media, on a given conversion or purchase. In other words, with mix modeling, you can study the impact that all the aspects of your marketing plan have on the goal you’re trying to achieve.

The advantage of performing mix modeling is that you can attribute a given conversion to multiple marketing activities, which gives you a much better idea of what really led to the sale. For example, if you run a conversion campaign where you display ads on Facebook and Google, and you see a nice bump in organic traffic as a result of the campaign, but the conversion rate doesn’t improve much, you may want to re-evaluate your strategy and try another tactic. Or, if you’re looking to improve your conversion rate, you can try combining different tactics, such as SEO with display ads.

Why is this important?

With the growth of digital marketing, the number of attribution and mix modeling cases has increased dramatically. This is mainly because marketers are aware of the importance of these metrics and are looking for ways to improve them. However, despite the rise in popularity, many marketers still don’t fully understand the implications of these methods.

What’s more, simply knowing the terms and how they work isn’t enough. To truly reap the benefits of attribution and mix modeling, you need to understand how these methods can improve your marketing strategy and how you can put them into practice.

So, how does performing attribution and mix modeling change the game?

There are several ways that these methods change the game for the better. For instance, let’s say you’re a marketer for a skincare brand, and you want to increase your product sales. How might you go about doing this? One way would be to conduct industry research and find out what products, features, or styles your target audience is most likely to purchase. Once you have this information, you can create marketing content (such as a webinar or a YouTube video) that appeals to this audience.

Let’s say you discover that your target audience is most likely to purchase pedicure supplies. So, you create a blog post titled, “How to Give the Perfect Pedicure Using Nothing But Neoprene Sandals,” and you schedule it to go live the day before Halloween.

Now suppose you want to know which of your marketing activities had the biggest impact on the sale. You could look at your Google Analytics data, and you’ll see that the day before the scheduled blog post went live, you had five visitors. In other words, your target audience was exposed to your content five times, and they all landed on a single page, the day before the blog post was published. This is how often your target audience saw your content, and it led to the purchase.

What if we told you that this content wasn’t even directed at your target audience? Well, in that case, the data would tell you that five visitors didn’t have any impact on the sale. This is because your content isn’t tailored to appeal to this audience — it’s designed for everyone. As it turns out, two of these five visitors were already converted in advance and purchased the product before they even saw the blog post.

In the example above, it’s clear that the blog post did not have the desired impact. In fact, if you want to improve your conversion rate, it would be a good idea to either scrap the blog post completely or re-purpose it for a different audience.

Let’s now look at an example from pharmaceuticals. Imagine that you’re a marketer for a new medication to treat a rare disease, and you want to increase the number of people who learn about your product. How might you go about doing this? One way would be to conduct research and determine the type of people most likely to be affected by your medication. Once you have this information, you can design a marketing campaign that appeals to these people. For instance, you might decide to target women between the ages of 18 and 40 who have a strong emotional connection to someone they love.

In the above example, the content was designed to hit a nerve — it alludes to a recent study that showed people with strong connections to those they care about are more likely to purchase life-saving medication than those without these connections. Therefore, this content appeals to people who are likely to be most affected by the product, and because it was designed to inspire action, it increased the chances of these patients taking the medication.

Mix modeling allows you to study the impact that various marketing activities have on a given goal, such as increasing conversion. To show you how this can be beneficial, below we’ll use the example from pharmaceuticals and apply it to a different industry.

How does Mix Modeling help with marketing attribution?

If you want to use online marketing attribution to its fullest, you need to keep in mind that not all marketing activity impacts a buyer’s journey in the same way. Some activity, such as SEO, can have a more noticeable impact than others, such as email marketing. To make sure you account for all of the activity that led up to the purchase, you need to use a mix modeling approach.

Put it into practice

To see what actually happens when you use these methods, let’s dive into the example we mentioned earlier. Let’s say that you’re a marketer for a skincare brand, and you want to increase the product sales. How might you go about doing this? One way would be to conduct industry research and find out what products, features, or styles your target audience is most likely to purchase. Once you have this information, you can create marketing content (such as a webinar or a YouTube video) that appeals to this audience.

Now suppose you want to know which of your marketing activities had the biggest impact on the sale. You could look at your Google Analytics data, and you’ll see that the day before the blog post was published, you had five visitors. In other words, your target audience was exposed to your content five times, and it led to the purchase.