Google Ads Attribution Models

Key Takeaways

when you go to make a purchase online you might conduct a number of different searches you might start off with a pretty high level product focused search then you might start to narrow down on specific features or benefits and then once you're ready to make the purchase you might conduct a brand search and go directly to the site that you want find exactly what you want and convert the challenge for advertisers is to determine which of those touch points should get credit for that conversion is it the last one that was the closest to the actual purchase is it the first one where the customer became aware of your brand or is it some combination of those two with the touch points in the middle getting some form of credit that's what attribution models seek to help you figure out there are six different attribution models on google that will assign credit for conversions based on different modeling to help you make sure that you're focusing on the right campaigns ad groups and keywords in your account so today i want to run through the six different attribution models in google ads explain what each of them are and then i'm going to tell you a report that you can look at to compare the numbers between different models with your existing campaigns and lastly we'll go over how you can adjust the attribution models for each of your conversion actions to make sure you're optimizing on the metrics that you want i want to start off by talking through the six different kinds of attribution models that we have available in google and i've got the image source down here from optimizer because our friend fred put this together it's a lot better than anything i was going to do so thanks fred appreciate it save me some time each of these models as you can see by the bars and each of the little icons gives different attribution to different steps along the user journey so i'm going to go through each of these and we're absolutely going to go out of order for the image that's here but i think it'll help make sense as we kind of progress and talk about the ones that go from the most basic to the more complex first is going to be the last click attribution model this is going to be the default this is what pretty much every platform uses this is what we've been opted into for the last however many years that the google ads platform has been around effectively all credit is given to the last touch point within your google ads account before a conversion so in theory if somebody did three separate google searches for something only the last one would get credit with the last click model this also tends to be why brand conversions get a lot of credit because usually if you're trying to do some research you go through you do all the research you're comparing brands all that sort of thing the last option that you usually search is going to be a brand keyword the next model is just as basic just as easy but it's the complete opposite if you will so first click is going to be the attribution model that gives all the credit to the first click when somebody comes through so again if we go back to the example where somebody searched for three different phrases clicked on your ad every time the first search that they conducted whatever that keyword ad group campaign was that is going to be given all of the credit for the conversion no other touch point whether the second one or the third one which is the last one will be given any credit everything goes to the first one now we're going to start getting into more of the complex attribution models where we have credit divvied up based on different touch points throughout the conversion process the easiest one to grasp i think is linear this means that credit is shared equally across any touch point so if you have that same three different search queries each one is going to be given one third of a conversion because there were three different steps and each one according to this model played an equal role in getting that conversion although the example i gave only has three touch points you can see in the chart here that it has an example of four different touch points this can be upward of 10 20. doesn't matter how many touch points there are google will give credit equally to all of the different actions that went into that conversion the next option is time decay and in this model you're given credit to add interactions that are closer to the conversion itself so basically the first touch is going to have the smallest amount of credit and then each subsequent step after that is going to have more and more credit given to it with the last touch point having the most out of however many steps were in there there is a note that says credit is distributed using a seven-day half-life so once it hits that eight-day mark and it's eight days away from when the conversion took place it'll only be given half the credit had it been given if it would have converted a day earlier so there is a half-life that goes into it to make sure that the most recent touch point gives the most credit the next option is position based and as you can see by the images here the first and last touch get a good amount of the credit but there's still credit given to those touch points in the middle basically in position based the first touch gets 40 percent of the credit and the last touch gets 40 of the credit then all of the touch points in the middle split up the remaining 20 percent so in this model you're always going to have 40 percent on first click 40 on last click and then if there are two touch points in the middle each will get 10 if there's only one it'll get all 20 percent this way it kind of helps give some credit to the first last but it doesn't ignore any of the touch points that happen in the middle to make that conversion happen the last option is data driven and here google will use your conversion action data from previous conversions and divvy out credit based on what the data says if this conversion for whatever reason tends to have more influence from the first click it'll give more credit there and then divvy it up as it sees fit based on what your data says for each of the subsequent touch points along the conversion path although we don't get to see what the data is this is kind of a black box it does feel a little bit like some of the bidding strategies that google has this is a good attribution model to use if you have enough volume there are some limitations on data driven attribution to use this model your conversion action must have at least 3 000 ad interactions on the supported network and it must have 300 conversions within the last 30 days so effectively you need to average about 10 conversions per day to be able to use data driven attribution for that conversion action each of these different models have their own use case and there's no right or wrong model that you should use for your business the data-driven model is great in so far as it uses data based on previous conversions but again it is a little bit of a black box and not all accounts are going to be eligible for it because of volume limitations the main thing to take away from these different attribution models is that since last click is the default and it gives the most credit to the click right before the conversion every other attribution model is going to have some sort of a growth focus because it gives more credit to touch points that happened earlier on in the conversion process than the last click so depending on how aggressive you want to be with a growth mindset different attribution models might make sense for you but you don't have to decide this in a vacuum you don't have to just look at these options choose the right one and go from there google does have a tool in the platform that'll allow us to compare different attribution models for our conversion actions so let's hop into google and i'll show you where that is i'm in a google ads account that i know has a good amount of conversion data that we can look at and i'm in the attribution section of the interface to navigate here you come up to the main menu under tools and settings and under measurement you'll come down to attribution and it'll land you on a screen that looks about like this there's a ton of really cool stuff in this entire section of the interface but i don't have time to go through that in this video so instead we're going to hop over here to model comparison on the left and here's where we're going to be able to compare the different attribution models within the account there are a few different things that you can utilize to customize this report however you want to the first is that you can decide which dimension of your account you want to check attribution for network and campaign type are new but they're available in this account there's also campaign ad group keyword and device and those are going to be the most basic options that will probably be available in everybody's account for now i'm just going to go ahead and leave it as campaign because we already blurted out and might as well just stick with it in the table down below we do have the campaign names over here on the left and then we start to see the different conversion performance here you'll see that there's last click verse data driven and then the change and this is where you'll compare the impact that changing an attribution model would have currently you can see that for this first campaign up at the top if we were to change from last click to data driven we would lose about 1.5 percent of the conversion volume almost all of the other ones we would end up gaining some sort of conversion volume and there's only one other where we would lose any touch points there and the reason that this happens goes back a little bit to what i said in one of the previous sections is because this top line here is a brand campaign so it has the majority of last click conversions everything else down here is going to be a non-brand campaign of one shape or form every time we start to shift away from that last click model we're almost invariably going to be given more credit to non-brand or further up the funnel campaign tactics you can then also come over here and compare what the different cost per conversion would be if you were to shift and this is important to know because although we're only seeing a difference from three dollars and 28 cents to 3.33 on these two models if that change gets to be much bigger you might need to start to set some new expectations either with your boss or with your clients to know that when you shift attribution models your cost per conversion is likely going to change and you might need to adjust your kpis so there are a few ways that we can customize this report right now it is showing us just the difference between last click and the data driven model but if we come up here you can see that you can choose which models you want to compare so right now i'm going to leave this as last click but then if we wanted to change to any of the other models on this side we could compare to first click linear time decay and position based so just for fun let's do first click and now we'll see that we've got quite a bit different stats coming in the brand campaign has now lost three percent of the conversion volume that it had while some of these others are gaining upwards of four percent which still might not seem like a big percentage but when this campaign went from 348 conversions to 363 that is quite a big difference across the board i don't think anybody would be irritated about gaining 15 conversions on a campaign the biggest thing to note is that you'll still have the exact same number of conversions they're just being displaced into different campaigns because they're being given credit for conversions as opposed to adding or taking away from the account just remember you're not losing conversions you're just changing where they're being attributed the last thing i want to talk about for this quick overview is how you compare certain conversion actions so over here you'll see that by default we're reviewing this data for all actions included in the conversions column but if you want to change the report based on just a certain conversion you can click the drop down determine which actions you want whether it's going to be this default first one which is all actions included in the conversions column you can adjust it to also see all actions so if you have some conversions that are being counted only in the all conversions column but not the conversions column you can also review the report for that and compare with any of the different models but then you'll also see here that although their names are blurred out we also have individual conversion actions that you can compare the results for across your different campaigns so if we wanted to see just this first one here we would just click on that and now we might think that we want to shift this specific conversion action to a different attribution model because it makes more sense that way or we might not we might leave it where it is because all the data looks pretty good once you determine that you do want to change your attribution model for any given conversion it is very simple to do so we just need to hop back up into tools and settings go back to measurement and click conversions i've alluded to it over the course of this video but you do need to change the attribution model for each conversion action individually there's no way to change all the conversion action attribution models at the same time so you will need to do it on an individual basis but it's very simple all we need to do is click the conversion action that we want head down into settings and then you'll see the bottom one here is attribution model so we can open it up right now this one is on position based but if we want to we can come in here from the drop down choose whichever option we want if we want to change it to data driven we just need to hit save but for right now i don't want to do that so i'm just going to click cancel and then done the conversion action i just showed you is one that has all of the data requirements that it needs for data driven attribution but if we choose an action that does not have enough data like this one and we go into edit the settings if we choose from the drop down you'll see that data driven is grayed out because it does not have enough volume to be eligible for this specific conversion action but you can choose across all of the other five available attribution models if you want to change that so as you can see it's pretty easy to change the attribution model for the conversion actions that you want to i want to close out by touching on just a quick few takeaways to make sure that you have everything you need to start going down the path of choosing the right attribution model as i mentioned earlier there's no right or wrong attribution model it's the one that makes the most sense for you based on what your data says how you want to assign credit and how much of a growth mindset you want to have away from the last touch attribution model one thing i do want you to keep in mind is that everything that i showed you in this video is only for your google accounts now that might seem logical because we were in google ads but what i mean by that is that it's not taking into account if somebody does a search on google and a search on bang and reviews a quora forum about the topic it only is going to think about which of your google campaigns had a specific touch point at some point in the future we will do a multi-channel attribution analysis but just keep in mind in the back of your head that all of the attribution models we talked about here will be google ads specific remember you do have to set them for individual conversion actions but they don't always have to be the same across each individual action maybe you notice that one conversion action like phone calls needs to be a lot more last click focused whereas some different search campaigns where maybe you have an online form can be more first click or position based something along those lines any models that you use will impact whatever automated bidding that you're using to try and optimize toward conversions whether it's maximize conversion target cpa maximize conversion value or target row as all of those are going to be impacted if and when you change an attribution model make sure that you know how big of a swing and performance you might see if you start to make changes there and although anytime you hear people talk about attribution on google ads they're probably always going to tout all the benefits of data-driven attribution you do need to meet data minimums to use that for each individual conversion action it's not the account as the whole it needs to be each action meeting those requirements to utilize data driven attribution hopefully this overview makes you feel a little bit more confident about the differences between all the different attribution models and shows you the tools you can use to start to make decisions if you need to change them in your account if you have any additional questions about attribution models or if you have a favorite that you just really want to rave about make sure to hit us up in the comments below thanks for watching our video if you thought it was useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you want to get notified of when a new one comes out be sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel you