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As marketers thrive to make better informed and data-driven marketing spend/allocation decision ; Digital Attribution is one of the most hot trending topics in the Digital World ! According to Adobe/Econsultancy last survey about Digital Intelligence trend ; 58% of the marketers believe that a perfect model is impossible:
Good news being that we are not looking for perfection but a model which is as reliable as possible for your business, which will enable to measure afterwards your campaigns adjustments and optimization moves lift - and understand which spends to which channel impact actually your bottom line KPI. Models won't be the same for each business ; the level of complexity required is inherently tied to your business model and your customer path to purchase. To keep it simple, your goal is to know if you are spending wisely : your attribution model is the ground for testing your spends strategy. I have been away for a few weeks holiday and tried to catch up with the latest articles about it since my latest post on "Fun with algorithms: Attribution and media mix-modeling" and the 2 latest acquisition (Adometry by Google and Convertro by AOL). As the list was piling up, it seems to be the perfect time for a best-of articles.

Best-of articles about Digital Attribution

I have divided them into 4 categories so that you can pick and choose:

Critical Thinking

• Re-Thinking Digital Attribution : Why Sophisticated Modeling of Attribution is Mostly a Waste of Time
• Has Google sold billions of dollars in ads that don't work?
• Don’t Give Me No Stinking Credit : Re-thinking Digital Attribution

How-to, Best Practices, Attribution Model review

• It's not a recent article but always good to read: Multi-Channel Attribution Modeling: The Good, Bad and Ugly Models
• 10 Tips For Creating An Effective Marketing Attribution Program
• Learning More About That Other Half: The Case for Cohort Analysis and Multi-Touch Attribution Analysis
• Multi-Channel Marketing Manifesto Part Two: Data-Driven Attribution Best Practices
• The Top 5 Online Marketing Attribution Models – and How to Use Them

Best Share of Voice / WOM

Article Title	Total Share	Author Name
Sizmek announces new Attribution Suite for cross-channel analytics	847	n/a
4 things you need to know about mobile ad attribution | Mobile	641	Adam Foroughi
The Case for Cohort Analysis and Multi-Touch Attribution Analysis	536	n/a
Re-Thinking Digital Attribution : Why Sophisticated Modeling of Attribution is Mostly a Waste of Time	348	Gary Angel
Why does my path to purchase matter? A tale of Soccer Shoes, Marketing, Sports Sponsorship, the World Cup, and Digital Attribution	334	Nancy Smith

Food for thoughts to start your attribution journey

• Do You Actually Have an "Attribution" Problem Worth Solving?
• User Engagement Across Channels by Steve Briley - XCMO 2014
• Forrester Survey: Data-Driven Attribution Is Hard But Worth It
• DAA Webinar | Interactive Storytelling in Multichannel Marketing Analytics

In my opinion, Attribution is still at his early stages thus it's a really exciting moment to work on this as everything can still be defined, new definition, new rule, new way of thinking, new best practices... If you consider moving from the last click attribution to a data-driven / customer journey based customized model.

Here are my step by step advices:

1. Start small and improve iteratively your model. We have all those models at hand and additionally the one everyone talks about "Data-driven attribution" model, which is customized attribution model based on statistic and economic rules relying on your customer journey statistical analysis.
   
   
   
2. Make sure that this attribution question is really relevant to your business and to what extend before starting The basis of attribution model is to understand which channel contribute at which extend to your conversions/revenue ; but what if 80% of your conversions happen on a first time visit with only 1 channel involved, what if you had only 3 touch points in the whole customer journey? What is you have 5 different path to purchase ? Depending on your business model, those questions will be relevant or not : make sure your ask those anyway.
   
   
   
3. Be conscious of your data challenges
   as this may totally throw off your model and inherent analysis. Be conscious of the data you are collecting, are they enough to pull a model together : do you already have a unified view of your customer journey or are you using 5 different tools to measure? In a perfect world, you need as much data as possible in the same environment: from TV influence to social media, to paid media to retail sales or online sales without forgetting mobile experience or emailing... But as said you can start small and improve it !
   
   
   
4. Understand your customer journey
   try to map it either via digging into your data or looking at benchmark or asking your client directly before kicking off - there is no need to start from scratch or copy what others do, you have already a wealth of data at hand to learn from !
   
   
   
5. LEARN from existing dataset, TEST and LEARN and OPTIMIZE and TEST again !
   
   

What about you ? What's your POV? Did you read any nice article, whitepaper, webinar... about Attribution that should be mentioned here?