Attribution Modeling in Online Advertising

Abstract

In correspondence with the increased use of the information and communication technology, companies have adopted various measures of online advertising and have continuously increased the online advertising spending. The technology enables companies to monitor and steer their advertising activities and generally allows to register all (online) touchpoints of a prospect with a company, the so-called customer journey. As one prospect may have multiple contacts with a brand, advertisers have to analyze how different touchpoints contribute to the advertising success. Advertisers may use a variety of heuristic and analytic attribution models. This chapter presents and discusses the most relevant attribution models – heuristic and analytic variants. Heuristic attribution models are simple rule-based approaches, whereas analytic attribution models infer the impact of different marketing channels across customer journeys and calculate the probability of a successful customer journey. Then, some business implications and potential pitfalls of attribution models are discussed.