Are you aware of what causes your customers to convert from leads to sales? In the current digital world, it can be hard to find the exact cause of conversion. This is where marketing attribution comes in handy.

Marketing attribution creates a point to point map of your customer’s journey, illustrating every customer touchpoint and what role that point played in conversion. Once you know what works best, you can decide how to move your digital marketing strategy forward. This will help you with your decisions around marketing investments, platforms, and campaigns.

Many marketing platforms such as Google and Facebook offer methods of tracking marketing attribution. Facebook has both their basic attribution feature in Facebook Ads, and a standalone app. To get the most out of Google Analytics and Facebook Ads, here are some tips and tricks your marketing team can try.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics lets you create multi-channel funnel reports to show exactly how different channels come together to create a conversion.

Select your report types

There are five types of reports available. Each has its own strengths and unique functions. Aside from a basic overview and path length analysis, you can also view assisted conversions. This gives each channel a value that it adds to the customer experience. It provides a top conversion path or the value of each unique channel in use. You can also see a time lag report or how many days it took the customer to convert.

Understand the conversion path

Customers might purchase your products or services from a combination of channels. For example, a display ad may lead them to social media, where they interact with a paid ad, and then conduct an organic search to find the purchase. Google Analytics will show you this entire journey. This will help you better understand which marketing tactics are working.

Google Analytics also offers 17 different dimensions to analyze conversion paths. These dimensions range from keyword-based analysis to ad word analysis to display URL analysis. You can use this feature to figure out how your campaign is performing in conversion rate terms.

Channel labels

Each customer touchpoint on the conversion path is called a channel. Google Analytics gives seven default channels for marketing attribution. These channels range from organic search to display to referrals. You can also customize your channel labels depending on what you want to analyze. For example, you can determine keyword searches for specific keywords to help you optimize your search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns.

Facebook attribution tool

There are many more features for Google Analytics to try and it’s a very user-friendly interface. With a little time and effort you can get to know Google Analytics and start measuring your marketing attribution rates today. It has been possible to track ad performance on Facebook from the start, but the closed nature of the platform meant it was limited to mainly last-click attribution. All you could see was the customer journey in Facebook, not outside of the site or app.

Luckily, Facebook has since premiered its Facebook Attribution tool. You can track Facebook ads across Facebook channels such as Instagram and Messenger, as well as out-with Facebook channels.

Simply log into your Facebook Business Manager account or create an account. Select Facebook Attribution from the options menu, create a line of business, and then set up your different ad accounts. You can integrate multiple data sources and choose from a single business to separate brands. The more data sources you add, the more accurate your marketing attribution will be.

Facebook Attribution offers six different models: Last Touch, Positional, Even Credit, Time Decay, Data Drive and Last Click. Get to know each function and explore how it might work for you. You can then download customized reports to help you find correlations in your marketing strategy, dominant behavior patterns, and deviances from marketing expectations.

Use Google Analytics and Facebook Ads for marketing attribution

Google Analytics and Facebook Ads are great options for tracking marketing attribution. Both allow multi-channel attribution, covering many channels and customer touchpoints. However, you have to pay for Facebook Ads while Google Analytics is free. Facebook won’t be accessible if your brand isn’t on Facebook, whereas Google still covers every touchpoint your brand is on. Google can also draw from historical records, while Facebook starts from the moment you’ve set up the platform. Google might have the edge, still. It’s a close tie. You can realistically use both to further your marketing attribution.

This guest blog article was written by Katherine Rundell is an eLearning consultant at Academized. She has been involved in many projects. She like discussing and writing on management, marketing and finances. You can follow her on Twitter @KatherineRunde2.