Comparing attribution models

Attribution models determine how credit is given to touchpoints for a conversion. Each attribution model can attribute your conversions differently to give you different perspectives and results on how your ads are performing. By applying different attribution models to your data, you'll be able to explore the roles that different publishers, channels or tactics play in driving conversions. As you become familiar with each model, you'll gain perspective on which ads may be most impactful for your business, and build intuition on how to optimise your campaigns going forward.

If you've typically been accustomed to applying a last click model to your conversion data, which gives 100% credit to the last click that happened before a conversion took place, you may notice that campaigns towards the bottom of your conversion funnel tend to receive more credit than other campaigns towards the top of your conversion funnel. By switching to an even credit model, which gives an equal percentage of the credit for a conversion to each touchpoint, you may notice that those campaigns towards the top of your conversion funnel may now receive more credit.

You can create custom reports of your conversion performance data grouped by campaign to see which tactics are most impactful in driving conversions. Try applying different attribution models to your data to see which of your campaigns may have generated the most return on ad spend (ROAS), and use this information to adjust and optimise your advertising budget to your more impactful campaigns and tactics.

For campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and the Audience Network, you can use the data-driven attribution model, which is a statistical model developed by Facebook that gives a percentage of credit to each touchpoint based on the incremental impact they had on driving your business goals.

Learn more about attribution models.

Comparing attribution windows

Attribution windows specify which touchpoints you want the attribution model to consider. The attribution window that you select will be used to determine how long before a conversion the model should look for touchpoints to give credit. Explore different attribution windows to see how changing the attribution window impacts the number of conversions reported.

Especially if your business requires a long purchase consideration cycle, you'll want to make sure that the attribution window you're using is long enough to consider important touchpoints towards the beginning of your conversion paths. For example, buying a car will probably have a longer purchase consideration cycle because it's a larger investment that may involve more research on the consumer's part. The consideration cycle for a car is likely to be longer than that of a video game, which may be purchased more quickly.

By comparing the percentage of conversions to the actual number of purchases you've measured, you can begin to identify what attribution window length may be most suitable for your business.