Attribution Masterclass: My Notes - Pt. 2 - Multi-Touch Attribution

This blog post is part of a series on marketing attribution. 

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2. Multi-Touch Attribution

2.1. UTM parameters

2.2. User journeys and user stitching

2.3. How to analyze Multi-Touch Attribution (w/ Amplitude)

2. Multi-Touch Attribution

2.1. UTM parameters

1. It’s an old topic but still one of the most important ones

2. We still have issues with UTMs:
   1. Sometimes are missing
   2. They are inconsistent

3. This is why you need a UTM strategy:
   1. When you own a link remember to tag it!
   2. You need a process
   3. You can do it manually
   4. But even automatically, defining rules on the 3rd party platforms

4. Techniques for UTM paramaters definition
   1. Random ID in utm_campaign
   2. Don’t use UTM parameters inside your own website
   3. [More on this available in video recordings]

5. References about UTM parameters
   1. Campaign (UTM) Parameter Naming Conventions revisited: Cryptic vs. Positional vs. Key-Value Notation | by Lukas Oldenburg | Medium by Lukas Oldenburg
   2. How to Improve Paid Media Analysis and Performance with Naming Conventions By Barbara Galiza.

2.2. User journeys and user stitching

1. Simplest example of user journey: landing page > conversion
   1. No issues with this
   2. UTMs are probably there
   3. Hard for cookies to be missed (but see below about this point)

2. SAAS example: landing page on www.* > user creates an account on app.* > user buys a subscription through Stripe
   1. Issues:
      1. Most marketers take care of the account creation and stop there but this still doesn’t tell what mktg initiative lead to subscriptions
      2. This is based on IPs or cookies but we actually have no real control about them (e.g. Safari changing settings).
   2. The solution to these issues is the use of user_id (GA), hubspot_lead_id (Hubspot), hashed emails or email domain IDs, and so on

3. Ways to do user stitching is storing all the IDs you have
   1. In a Data Warehouse (DWH)
   2. Or in a leading system, for instance you decide GA is your primary platform and get Hubspot IDs data in there

4. In the case of guest checkouts you can join client_id and transaction_id. In general it depends if we’re talking about user level attribution or order level attribution

5. How does server-side tagging fits in this?
   1. Users using different devices are treated as separate users in client-side tracking systems
   2. This is why server-side tagging systems can help vendors - such as Meta with Facebook CAPI - optimize their campaigns
   3. One tricky issue with server-side tagging is how to handle legal consent.

2.3. How to analyze Multi-Touch Attribution (w/ Amplitude)

1. Amplitude gives the chance to connect different data sources (e.g. BigQuery, GAds and so on)

2. We tried the attribution models comparison with a custom table where we added a First Touch, Last Touch and Data-Driven views of the demo dataset, side by side
   1. Unfortunately this is not available with other tools - such as GA - unless you build it on your own - with BigQuery

3. Amplitude gives the chance to create a free account and explore a demo dataset with custom charts.