Digital Marketing is now considered to be one of the most common ways used by businesses to reach out to a wider audience primarily due to the fact that most people now use the Internet on a regular basis. Hence, the goal for businesses is to ensure that their product or service is advertised to potential customers over the Internet in every way possible.
This can also be attributed to the fact that there are several digital platforms on which companies can market their products and services. Examples of such platforms include Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Bing, etc. Most of these platforms have functionalities that allow advertisers to track potential customers until they become a customer. For example, Bing has Bing Attribution Model.
When running Digital Marketing advertisements, it is important to track the source of the conversions. This should involve tracking the path that a potential customer followed until the conversion happened. The marketer should also be able to find out the level of contribution of each individual interaction between the user and the advertisements towards conversions. This is possible with Attribution Modelling.
Attribution Modelling allows marketers to track and measure conversions. The Bing search engine is a popular way of running digital advertisements among businesses. One of the most significant advantages of using Bing for advertisements is the Bing Attribution Model that allows advertisers to perform Attribution Modelling while running digital ad campaigns.
This article will provide you with a simplified understanding of what Attribution Modelling is & how the Bing Attribution Model works.
Table of Contents
Introduction to Attribution Modelling
Image Source: https://agencyanalytics.com/blog/marketing-attribution-models
An Attribution Model refers to a set of rules used to assign credit for conversions to the touchpoints in a customer’s journey. Most businesses today wish to have an in-depth understanding of which Marketing Channels are helping them generate revenue and which aren’t that effective. This is primarily due to the dependence of businesses on data-driven decision-making.
Having an understanding of the performance of various Marketing Channels allows marketers to plan their future strategies accordingly & ensure that the channels that are performing well continue to grow and figure out what they have to do to improve the performance of channels that are not performing well. Attribution can be difficult in case multiple Marketing Channels are being used to advertise the product or service.
For example, a customer may click a Facebook link that takes him/her to an e-commerce website to view a product. The customer can later visit the same web page by clicking a link attached in a product promotion e-mail. The customer can also use an Organic search listing to visit the product page and make a purchase. Reaching the e-commerce website from any of those sources could result in a sale of the product.
The process of determining the source behind the sale is called Attribution. There are different Attribution Models that marketers use to get this information. These models give marketers insights into how, where, and when a customer interacts with a brand. Attribution helps businesses customize their ad campaigns to meet customer needs and increase their Return on Investment (ROI).
More information on Attribution Modelling can be found here.
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Understanding the Bing Attribution Model
Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bing_logo_(2016).svg
Bing is a search engine operated and owned by Microsoft. It has a search infrastructure built with the goal of providing relevant search results to the user in a short period of time. It provides a set of features that allow its users to search for a web page on the Internet, based on a search query, look for instant answers to questions, translate content from one language to another, view news, perform images searches, display business advertisements, etc.
Advertisements that run on the Bing engine are known as Bing Ads (now Microsoft Ads). Along with the ability to run advertisements, it also allows users to perform Attribution using the Bing Attribution Model.
The Bing Attribution Model allows you to define the action that you want to treat as a conversion goal. For example, a purchase or signup for a newsletter is treated as a lead conversion goal for most businesses. All customer interactions until the conversion happens are tracked. Using Bing Attribution Model, you can keep complete track of what users do once they visit your website. Before Bing counts it as a conversion, it checks whether the user clicked the ad first. Bing Ads do not count an activity as a conversion, even if the activity matches the conversion goal unless it finds that the user clicked the ad before completing the action.
Bing Attribution Model: Conversion Tracking Code
Microsoft uses a specific tag to track conversions, and this tag is called the Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag. The purpose of this tag is to make the process of tracking conversions easier.
You should incorporate the UET tag into all web pages of your website and create specific conversion goals to be tracked by the UET tag within the Bing Attribution Model in Bing Ads.
Bing Attribution Model: “As-it-happens” Model
In a lot of cases, conversions will happen days or even weeks after the customer’s touchpoint or last click. In Bing Ads, touchpoints are treated as discrete actions that are attributed to the date that they occurred, which we can refer to as the “As-it-happens” Bing Attribution Model. As a result, Bing attributes conversions to the last click.
In some cases, a delay occurs between the initial click and the eventual conversion. This time delay is known as Conversion Latency. To determine the impact of your ads and account for the Conversion Latency, you need an Attribution Model to tell you which click is behind the conversion and when it happened. Bing attributes conversions to the date of the actual transaction.
For example, if a customer clicks on your ad on the first day of the month but converts on the fifteenth day of the month, Bing Ads will consider that action as a conversion that happened on day 15 of the month only. The interaction between the customer and your brand on the first day of the month is not considered.
This model gives your Marketing team an accurate reading of how many conversions or revenue you’re generating on a particular day. However, this approach is favourable for short-term results only since Bing Attribution Model does not record any ad conversions until they occur.
Limitations of the Bing Attribution Model
The following are the limitations of Bing Attribution Modelling:
- It uses the last click Attribution Model which doesn’t show the full path of a customer’s journey to conversion. This means that the other sources that contributed to the conversion don’t get any credit.
- In some cases, there might be other channels that were in some way responsible for the conversion. Bing Attribution Model does not take that into consideration. All other efforts taken to get a conversion are ignored, which means that businesses may end up making wrong decisions due to poor interpretation of ad conversions.
- Bing doesn’t allow users to change the Attribution Model from the default last click Attribution Model. This means that advertisers only have limited access to data as far as customers’ journey to conversion is concerned.
Conclusion
This article provided you with a simplified understanding of Attribution Modelling, why it’s necessary, along with in-depth information on how the Bing Attribution Model works. Most businesses today use multiple channels to advertise their products or service. To perform a common analysis to measure the performance of all your Marketing Channels, the data first needs to be integrated from all these channels into a centralized location. Making an in-house solution to do that will require high investment and can instead be automated using platforms like Hevo.
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