New on Display & Video 360 – Attribution Path Reporting

We all know the importance of attribution, it is basically what separates digital marketing from other media channels. It’s what helps us as media buyers to analyze & understand how our campaign really performed and how we should optimize our activity. Attribution tells us what about the user journey from the moment the advertisement appeared to where the user converted. To help you enable attribution and to campaign more effectively, DV360 just rolled out new attribution modeling features, and attribution reporting options.  Below, I’m going to explain to you exactly how to use them.

What is attribution modeling?

An attribution model is a rule or set of rules that help you determine how conversions are assigned to an interaction (impression or click) in the conversion path process.  For example, the Last Interaction Model assigns 100% credit to the last interaction that immediately precedes sales or conversions. In contrast, the First Interaction model gives 100% credit to the first interaction that initiated the conversion path. In DV360, the default Floodlight model attributes 100% of the conversion value to the user’s last click before buying or converting. If there was no click, the model assigns the value to the previous impression.

How to use the Attribution Modeling Tool in DV360:

1st step: Create an advertiser attribution model for reporting and set the viewable impressions on the ‘Floodlight’ basic settings.

The process:

Navigate to Advertiser > Floodlight Configuration > Attribution models or to Advertiser > Resources > Floodlight group > Basic details > Attribution > Attribution models (DV360), as seen below:

You can choose the different attribution model as of the following options: (Last click, Last Interaction, First Interaction, Linear, Time Decay)

2nd step: Adding the preferred attribution model to the LI settings

You can easily set up the LI’s attribution agenda and configuration so that the LI’s activity will use the associated attribution regarding the user journey and KPI’s.

3rd step: Attribution reporting and performance analysis.

Use Path reports to gather insight about the path a given user took that led to a conversion. Full path reports can show the number of times a path occurred and the various events within the path. For example, let’s say that a unique user was exposed to the 1st funnel creative message and went to the landing page without leaving their personal information. When the user finally converts on the landing page, it could be after engaging with the brand 2-4 times with different messages and Call-to-Actions (C2A’s) before the actual conversion.  Thus, understanding their attribution path’s various events will enable you to determine the specific event that influenced the conversion. Afterwards, adding more funds to that path can help you generate a higher ROI and dramatically improve performance.  When counting conversions, path reports behave differently than other available offline reports. Path reports contain all attributed and unattributed conversions. All floodlight events are counted as conversions, even if they weren’t preceded by an impression or click.  How to set it up? Here is your answer.

Best practices

Interpret the results and adjust your campaigns

When you’re evaluating your channels’ effectiveness, use attribution models to reflect your advertising goals and business models. Whichever models you use, consider testing your assumptions by experimenting.  Invest more or less in a given channel based on what the attribution models show, then recheck your results to see how it’s working. Suppose you’re using more than one attribution model. In that case, you can compare the number of conversions or the amount of revenue attributed to your channels according to the assumptions in each model.  Not sure how to execute Attribution Modelling into your activities? No problem, let’s schedule a quick call and discuss the issue.