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Welcome to the special newsletter! 🎉 

Today, we’ll discover how using both first-touch and last-touch attribution can show how each channel, like organic search, helps in the customer journey—from the first moment of awareness to the final conversion. 🌟

Let's dive into the basics of multi-touch attribution: understanding the customer journey and how each interaction leads to a sale. 🚶‍♂️💼

Don't miss out – read on to stay ahead of the curve!😉

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Understanding the Customer Journey 👀

What Is A Marketing Funnel? 📈

What Is Attribution? 🎯

Which Types Of Attribution You Should Focus On? 🎯📊

Best Of Both Worlds: Layering First- And Last-Touch For Holistic Insights 🌐🛠️

Understanding the Customer Journey

A customer journey is a term used in marketing to describe the process a potential customer goes through, from first learning about your brand to becoming a customer. 🚶‍♂️➡️🛒

Basically, the customer journey is super important for any website that wants to turn visitors into customers. It gives you a plan to create a user-friendly design that meets your users' needs and behaviors. This approach improves their experience and boosts your conversion rates, which means more sales for your business. 📈💼

Every interaction a potential customer has with your brand’s content is a step on this journey – each one helping to turn a shopper into a buyer. 🛍️✨

Since everyone is different, each customer journey is unique. Each user has specific needs that are met through various interactions with your brand. These touchpoints help them decide to make a purchase.

Ideally, your brand offers a lot of content like web pages, articles, blogs, ads, emails, social media posts, and more. All these elements work together to encourage visitors to use your services or buy your products. 🖥️📧📱

Although each journey is unique and numerous, it's too much to study each one in detail. So, to keep track and optimize your efforts, you can categorize these journeys into a broader view known as a marketing funnel. This way, you can see which marketing strategies are most effective at turning visitors into customers. 🧩➡️📊

What Is A Marketing Funnel?

A traditional marketing funnel consists of five layers representing a group of potential customers along their high-level customer journey.

The layers of a marketing funnel typically include:

• Awareness.

• Interest.

• Consideration.

• Nuture.

• Conversion.

Picture this: your new customers start at the top of what we call the "funnel" 🕳️, where they learn about your brand. Think of it like making a new friend. Then, they move down to the middle, considering whether to buy from you. Finally, at the bottom, they decide to make a purchase 🛍️.

To make your marketing work best, you need to know what catches people's interest and what convinces them to buy. Once you figure that out, you can focus on what works best 📈.

But how do we know exactly what made a customer decide to buy? Attribution helps us track which parts of the journey led to a sale 🕵️‍♂️.

What Is Attribution?

Marketing attribution ties conversions to specific marketing materials, revealing the most effective content in converting visitors to customers. This is achieved through tracking codes like UTMs and pixels, phone call tracking, and dedicated URLs via services like Bitly. Understanding the types of attribution helps determine which tracking methods to implement.

Which Types Of Attribution You Should Focus On?

There are many types of marketing attribution you should focus on , but the most effective to build out your first, but powerful multi-touch campaign are:

• First-Touch Attribution.

• Last-Touch Attribution.

So, in the past, you probably used first-touch and last-touch attribution models to make your campaigns work better. But guess what? If you mix them together, you get something even better: multi-touch attribution! 🌟 

Today, we'll talk about boosting your conversions by looking at how people first find out about your brand and how they finally decide to buy your stuff. 📈

First-Touch Attribution: Capturing Initial Engagement

1. First-touch attribution means focusing on the first time someone interacts with your brand. 🤝 This interaction could happen on social media, through a Google search, or by clicking on a referral link. Tools like Google Analytics 4 and Adobe Analytics offer ways to track these initial interactions in their reports.

2. Using first-touch attribution in your digital marketing strategy has some cool benefits:

3. Understanding awareness: It helps you see how effective your marketing is at the very beginning of the customer journey. 🧐 By knowing which channels bring in users first, you can make your brand more visible where it counts.

4. Budgeting smartly: Figuring out which channels kick off the interaction can help you spend your marketing budget wisely. 💰 If you know where people first find you, you can put more money into those channels for better results.

5. Making content that clicks: Analyzing that first touch point gives you clues about what kind of content your audience likes. 📝 Armed with this info, you can make content that grabs attention and keeps people interested.

6. Using these strategies can help your brand make a bigger impact online! 🚀

Last-Touch Attribution: Closing The Conversion Loop

Sure! Here's a simpler version with emojis:

On the other hand, last-touch attribution only looks at the last thing a person does before they buy something. 🔄

Even though it's a bit basic, last-touch attribution has some good points:

1. 🎯 Conversion improvement: It helps marketers figure out which ads or websites are most likely to make people buy things. This helps them make ads that work better and get more sales.

2. 💼 Better resource use: Just like with first-touch attribution, knowing the last thing people do before buying helps you spend money better. Marketers can put more money into ads that really help sell things.

3. 🚀 Campaign success: Last-touch attribution shows exactly which ads or promotions make people buy stuff. This helps figure out which marketing ideas are best and make smarter choices based on data.

Best Of Both Worlds: Layering First- And Last-Touch For Holistic Insights

When you're trying to figure out how people find and buy stuff on your website, different ways of looking at it can help. Imagine you're tracking a journey, like from seeing an ad to making a purchase.

🔍 First-touch attribution counts when someone first finds your site. It shows which channels bring people in the door.

🏁 Last-touch attribution counts only the last channel someone uses before buying. Sometimes it gives too much credit to the last thing someone clicked on.

🤝 Multi-touch attribution mixes things up by looking at both the first and last touches. It gives credit to all the different steps along the way, not just the first or last one.

So, instead of just focusing on the first or last click, multi-touch attribution gives you a clearer picture of how people move from being curious to making a purchase.

2. Assess The Likelihood Of A Session Converting

In last-touch attribution, the credit for a conversion (like a sale) goes to the last channel a user interacted with. 📊 This approach often favors the channels used at the end of a user's journey, overlooking the importance of earlier interactions.

By looking at first-touch conversion rates too, marketers can see how effective early-stage marketing efforts are. This helps them understand the full picture of their marketing tactics and channels. 🔍✨

3. Determine The Impact Of Your First Entry Point On Last-Touch Conversion Rates

In this study, we explore how marketing efforts at the start of a customer's journey affect conversion rates at the end. 📊

To understand this, we compare the usual conversion rates of different channels with the conversion rates when a customer first finds us through organic search. This helps us see the benefit of early marketing efforts and how they influence the final results.

4. Determine The Impact Of Your First Entry Point On Last-Touch Average Order Values

Analyzing the impact of the first-touch channel on conversion rates helps us understand how a user's first entry point affects their later order value. 📈

We found that when organic search was the first touchpoint, nearly all last-touch channels saw an increase in average order value. 🌟

5. Evaluate The Contribution Of Early-Journey Marketing On Other Channel Revenue

By comparing first-touch and last-touch revenue attribution, marketers can see how much revenue is credited to different channels. This helps understand each channel's role in the conversion journey. For example, DAC found that 38% of revenue from first-touch organic search was later attributed to other channels.

6. Measure The Impact Of Early-Journey Content (Blog)

Early-stage research and informational content often seem undervalued with last-touch attribution. This content usually has fewer immediate conversions, leading last-touch to credit the final channel for conversions. 

However, over a longer period, we noticed that blog visitors typically return within five weeks to make purchases. 📅

Last-touch attribution alone misses this trend. By examining it, we found that blog visitors not only convert at a higher rate but also view more pages per visit and have a lower bounce rate. 📈

In digital marketing, understanding customer interactions is crucial. First-touch and last-touch attribution models each have their benefits: first-touch helps optimize awareness strategies, while last-touch refines conversion campaigns. Combining insights from both models enables marketers to create targeted campaigns, improving results and maximizing ROI.

Your Voice 🎤

Phew! That was a lot, right? But hey, knowledge is power🌟. We hope this edition gave you some insights and maybe even cleared up a few doubts.

Got questions or topics you'd like us to cover next? Holler at us! We’ll give you a shoutout in our next edition. If you have any questions, reply to this email and share your valuable feedback so we can aim to address them in our upcoming editions!

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