After a call with our Google Adwords rep this week we discovered that Google has changed their attribution model. When you are buying traffic from different sources it is a challenge to track customer’s pathways with 100% accuracy.
For example, a customer may click an ad on the display network and later click an ad on the gmail platform and finally “convert” by clicking on a search ad.
It is common to have multiple touch points like this, but difficult to measure and give credit where credit is due. Google recently made this somewhat easier with new attribution modeling.
Prior to this change you were forced to decide whether the give the conversion on the first click or the last click. However, you now have five different choices on how you credit a conversion.
One choice is called the “linear attribution model.” This model gives equal credit to each ad click.
For example, if a customer clicked on four separate ads, a fractional conversion of 25% will be credited to each click.
This model allows additional transparency in the effectiveness of your Adwords campaigns, keywords, and ads.