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Ben Zitney

Senior Product Manager

Choosing Your Attribution Model

Choosing the Right Attribution Model for Your eCommerce Brand


With a background in data visualization and analytics, Ben is responsible for the platform trusted by leading eCommerce brands like Vuori and Brooklinen use to transform data chaos into clarity.

In This Article:

Different customer journeys

Imagine yourself buying a new dog bowl versus shopping for a couch. The customer journey for one is simple, while the other is much more complex.

Shopping for a new dog bowl might be a 2-minute exercise with minimal research—a dog bowl is after all significantly cheaper than a couch. You could look around and quickly buy something that looks cute or has the features you want.

A couch, on the other hand, is an expensive purchase that could take weeks of consideration. This involves checking multiple sites to find the best deal, having to go back and forth to discuss with the people you share your home with, and possibly taking some in-store visits to try out the merchandise. All the while, you’re seeing ad after ad trying to draw you back to a website to purchase. It is a layered process, with many different touch points at play simultaneously.

The impact on your attribution models

It is obvious that these customer journeys are very different—and their attribution models would accordingly be different as well. If you’re selling dog bowls, you could use solely last-click attribution or maybe a mix with post-purchase survey data. This would suffice in getting you a good picture of what marketing touch points mattered the most.

This is because your customers likely don’t need many touch points before making a purchase. It might be an immediate impulse buy through social media adverts, or purchasing the first result you get in a Google search.

As for couch buying, it has many more touch points as a result of the layered customer journey.

Your business could be doing podcasts, billboard and bus stop advertisements, digital campaigns, and so much more. All this would play a role in your marketing strategy, by slowly nudging the customer closer and closer to purchase.

With a complex mix to meet a complex customer journey, attribution is a lot harder here, and requires a different approach in order to capture the return on investment for each touch.

We use dog bowls versus couches as an example here, but they represent the broad spectrum of customer journeys that exist. For your brand, your products could also be simple or complex. By identifying that and hence understanding your customer’s journey, we can pick an attribution model that will benefit your business.

What are the available data sources?

Before we dive further into attribution modeling, let’s first elaborate on the data and data sources. Without this data, our models would be empty and make all modeling efforts useless.

At Daasity, we’ve identified the 3 main data sources for your eCommerce brand: Post-purchase surveys, Discount codes, and Google Analytics.

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