Digital Marketing

Why A Marketing Attribution Strategy Is Key for SEO

June 08, 2019Joel Mehler

Marketing attribution is a strategy that allows businesses to identify crucial marketing touchpoints that exist along the customer journey. These touchpoints range from the first introduction to the point of conversion. The key goal of attribution is to determine which touchpoints and channels of engagement have the most significant impact on search engine optimization, and ultimately your ROI.

According to our friends at Google, an attribution model is a set of rules a business follows for determining where to give credit for conversions and revenue. There are various types of attribution models, each requiring a different approach to analytics. There are attribution model comparison tools that help businesses determine which channels have the most significant impact on conversions and revenue. A marketing attribution strategy helps you put all of these pieces together.

Why Attribution Is Key for a Successful SEO Campaign

Most businesses don’t have unlimited resources to devote to search engine marketing. They need to focus on and put their money and effort into the channels that generate conversions. Without an attribution strategy, you risk bleeding your marketing budget on ineffective channels.

When you’re able to compare multiple touchpoints and how they contribute to your conversion rate, you can get a more tangible grasp on the ROI that comes from each of your marketing channels. At the end of the day, SEO is all about the journey that begins with building visibility and then step by step, delivers prospects and leads to the conversion finish line. You can think of an attribution strategy as a roadmap to results that produce the biggest return for your business.

Person putting together marketing strategy on whiteboard

Why Strategy Is Important

When you take a broad look at your search engine optimization strategy, you’ll notice that it has lots of moving parts. You’ve got traffic coming from multiple directions and each action that a visitor or lead takes influences their next step in some way. When it comes to attribution, there are different models that look at these touchpoints.

The problem is knowing which models to look at how they work together. This is where strategy comes into play.

A few examples of attribution models include:

  • Last interaction, which looks at the last click/action before conversion
  • First interaction, which is the first point of engagement with a customer
  • Linear attribution, a measure of actions across the board
  • Time decay, which looks at the time an interaction occurred in relation to conversion
  • Position-based attribution
  • And the list goes on…

An attribution strategy is important for SEO because it not only helps you to know where to look, it also points you the direction where you need to devote your SEM efforts. For instance, an attribution strategy can enable you to build a more cohesive user experience map, set SEO campaign goals, funnel marketing dollars where they make the most impact and focus on marketing metrics that really matter.

Making Marketing Attribution Work for You

Are you ready to see a boost in ROI thanks to an attribution strategy that supercharges your SEO campaigns? We offer individualized SEO services that get things moving for your business. Contact Double Up Digital to learn more about our approach to successful search engine marketing today.

Joel Mehler

A graduate of the University of Alabama, Joel was first introduced to digital marketing and SEO while participating in an international internship program in Barcelona, Spain. Joel maintains consistent oversight on strategy performance, client relations and day-to-day operations. Joel is an avid traveler and spends much of his free time in search of Atlanta’s next fun trend.