What is Google Attribution?

Attribution within Google Analytics?

Google announced recently that they have developed and plan to roll out a new attribution platform, Google Attribution. We take a look at what this means for marketing teams and their attribution model.

How does Google Attribution work?

Google’s new platform goes a long way towards a more sophisticated attribution model since it allows for multiple touchpoints to be assigned attribution for a conversion. This means that ‘last click attribution’ will become a thing of the past in platforms such as Google Analytics and Google AdWords. This is a big positive for marketers since it will provide more insight into the user journey and exactly which marketing activities have influenced them to convert, rather than simply attributing 100% of the conversion influence to the last click/visit.

In addition to this, channels such as email, YouTube advertising and TV adverts will be part of this attribution model to give marketers an idea of the impact their wider campaigns are having on website performance. (In the case of TV adverts, Google has said that the platform will be capable of visualising data variations related to the times that TV ads are shown)

There is no doubt about the fact that this is a big step forward for Google. However, as great as this new attribution platform is, there is still much more that should be considered when analysing marketing performance.

Does it provide end to end attribution?

The reality is that full end to end attribution is a hot topic at the moment in digital marketing circles.

The development of their new attribution model is Google’s attempt at giving users more ways to analyse data and keep their product in line with the changing requirement in marketing reporting, but it still is only one piece of the puzzle.

Although at first glance Google Attribution may seem like a huge step forward (In reality it is as far as data analysis within Google platforms is concerned), in fact it still does not provide a completely relevant attribution platform since it still lacks some features in the ROI analysis area. When we say ROI in this context, we are talking about actual business revenue that can be solidly attributed to user activity.

With this in mind, it is important for marketing teams to understand the value of full end to end attribution, whilst using the new Google platform as an enhanced way to analyse top of funnel web metrics. Google Attribution will definitely add a string to the bow of marketers looking to get a broader view of their return on marketing spend, but there is still a long way to go before business decisions can be made based solely on data from a Google platform.