How to Get Better Attribution Data To Your Data Warehouse Using Freshpaint

Let's get the first question out of the way. Why should you give a f**k about setting up attribution with all the things on your plate? Simple. If you're heavy into digital marketing, you will want to ensure your acquisition spend is efficient.

Seems obvious, right? The thing is, countless companies I've interacted with need help to answer some basic questions that attribution helps illuminate.

Are you driving low-cost leads from that Facebook campaign, but you're upside down on CAC (how much it costs you to acquire a paying customer)? What's your visibility like into things like retention by source? How will you know when a channel is working, and it's time to double down?

Attribution is a critical metric for improving acquisition efficiency. So, the next question is how to do it. Let's get into that.

3 Major Types of Attribution Models

How you attribute a conversion to a paying customer is a highly debated topic, which I won't even begin to wade into. All you should know is that there are three central models: First-touch, Last-touch, and Multi-touch. Let me explain with examples.

First-Touch Attribution

Let's say you click on a LinkedIn ad promoting an upcoming virtual event Freshpaint is sponsoring. You get redirected to a landing page where there's an offer so good that you can't resist putting in your name and email.

Fast forward a few weeks, and you do a Google search for "Freshpaint" and click on a branded Google ad that takes you to a demo request landing page. You fill out the form, talk to an account executive, and become a paying customer two weeks later.

First-touch attribution will credit the conversion with the original LinkedIn ad hyping the virtual event. It's a helpful model when asking, "How do new users find me?"

Last-Touch Attribution

Let's say you click on an organic LinkedIn post that takes you to an article about Minimum Viable Analytics on the Freshpaint blog. Next, you register and attend a virtual panel that Freshpaint sponsors. Finally, you click on a Google Ad for HIPAA-compliant customer data, fill out a demo request form, talk to sales, and become a paying customer.

Last-touch would conclude that the Google Ad would get the credit for converting the paying customer. It's a helpful model when asking, "Where do my paid conversions come from?"

Multi-Touch Attribution

You're not wrong if you think first and last touch are overly simplistic views of how customers interact with brands. Don't get mad at me. I'm trying to explain this stuff.

Instead of just looking at the first and last interaction, multi-touch considers every interaction (that you can capture) in the customer journey.

There are many multi-touch models to consider: linear, time decay and W-shaped are a few examples. Let's cover the one that can effectively identify the best channels to engage new users and convert paid customers simultaneously: the U-shaped or position-based model.

Imagine the following interactions over three weeks: you visit a blog post from a LinkedIn organic post, you attend an event, you click into a display ad and read a couple of customer stories, you visit the Freshpaint homepage directly and click on the demo request button and eventually convert.

The U-shaped model will give the most credit to the first touch (LinkedIn post) and the last touch (direct visit).

80% of the credit goes to the first and last touch. That means the remaining 20% gets divided across the middle interactions. Over time it will help you identify the best channels to engage new users and which channels convert the best.

How Freshpaint Gets Attribution Data to Your Data Warehouse

Freshpaint helps automate the capture of attribution data to give a more accurate dataset in the warehouse, freeing you up to focus on the modeling and the analysis. Let’s get into how it all works.

Connecting Freshpaint to Your Data Warehouse

Freshpaint supports connections to the following data warehouses for customers on our business plan:

• Azure
• BigQuery
• Panoply
• Postgres
• Redshift
• Snowflake
• S3

You can learn more about Freshpaint’s support of data warehouses here.

How Does Freshpaint Handle Attribution

Freshpaint captures and attaches the standard UTM properties (source, medium, campaign, content, and term) to every event and passes that information to your data warehouse. Freshpaint shares every newly attributed interaction with your warehouse to give you the flexibility to support first-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch attribution models. This level of granularity allows for more in-depth downstream analysis of CAC and other UTM parameter-based modeling.

How Does Freshpaint Handle Sessions

Another thing that Freshpaint does to help you more deeply analyze your data in the warehouse is sessionize the data. Freshpaint groups events that occurred at roughly the same time into individual sessions.

Here are some of the reasons this can be helpful:

• You may want to understand the number of sessions it takes before someone initially converts.
• You may want visibility into funnel behavior by session. Did they reach step two of a three part funnel in the first session, but reached step three in their second session?
• You may want to know the number of times a user has to experience your product before they reach your activation thesis.

How Does Freshpaint Handle Identity Resolution

In addition to automatically capturing attribution as properties for every event, Freshpaint gives you a complete view of each customer's journey by consolidating all their actions into a unified customer profile.

We call this identity resolution.

Your customer may have interacted from a mobile device, from the web, or via an in-app notification. You'll want to ensure you can stitch all those interactions together and assign them to one customer.

Freshpaint helps deliver more accurate attribution data to your warehouse by unifying every customer interaction.

Freshpaint Automates Even More of Your Customer Data

Waiting for engineering sprint cycles to get the customer data you need to take action and measure outcomes eats into one of your most significant advantages: Speed.

Freshpaint helps you get the customer data you need in hours instead of a month by automating up to 70% of the customer actions across your product and site.

Learn more by signing up for a free trial or contacting one of our product experts.