What is Attribution Modeling?
Episode 04
Episode 04 Transcript
Welcome back to the Media Mix Minute. I’m John Colias of Decision Analyst’s Advanced Analytics Group. Today we’re going to talk about the term “attribution.” Attribution is used by pundits of marketing analytics, of which I am one, to talk about how much of a sale is attributable to different causes. And the first type of, there’s, the word “attribution” used in two ways. In the first way, it is used to measure, for example, the amount of additional unit sales that might be attributable to a kind of marketing activity. So, for example, the amount of additional units of sales, sales of a product that are attributable to one additional unit of gross rating points of TV advertising. This kind of attribution modeling is very much the same as what we would do in media mix modeling.
The second type of attribution modeling involves a different technique, which looks at the customer journey from investigating a product, to exploring alternatives, considering different alternatives, to finally making a purchase. For example, someone who buys a book on Amazon might visit various websites on the way to that final visit at Amazon to make the purchase. So this kind of attribution modeling measures the relative contribution of the earlier touchpoints to the final sale at the end of the customer journey. This kind of attribution modeling is something different from media mix modeling, and it offers an additional insight: That insight about the customer journey and the process and how much earlier touchpoints contribute to a final sale. So that kind of attribution modeling is different from media mix model, modeling and offers an additional insight.
Thank you.
Presenter
John Colias, Ph.D.
Senior VP Research & Development
As a leader with both university teaching and business consulting experience, John focuses on predictive modeling, prescriptive analytics, and artificial intelligence. As Senior Vice President, Research & Development, at Decision Analyst, John combines academic and business interests to help analytics professionals by offering cutting-edge analytic solutions tempered by business realism. He holds a doctorate in economics from The University of Texas at Austin, with specializations in econometrics and mathematical modeling methods.
