Attribution Window

Understanding attribution window one level deeper

Today in digital marketing, campaigns are getting easy to execute but difficult to measure. And in the coming days it will get even easier to execute but more difficult to measure its true outcome.

In measuring the effectiveness of digital campaigns, the attribution window plays a foundational role.

In today's newsletter, we will try to understand the nuances of the attribution window.

What is an attribution window?

Simply put, an attribution window is the time between the user's interaction with ads and the final expected action from the users.

It plays an important role in your campaign performance, budget allocation, and marketing efficiency.

So, where should you start while choosing the right attribution window:

• Start with your product’s conversion window. Look at how long users typically take to convert after their first visit.

• Then, choose the attribution window that captures at least 50% of the conversions.

• From there, you can keep increasing the attribution window to up to 80% of your conversions.

This is the simple way to start and refine your attribution. Now, let’s see this with an example.

Let’s use an OTA website for flight booking use.

In India, the average time between the first visit and the booking completion is in the range of seven days, and 80% of the conversions happen within 14 days.

For this use case we should keep the campaign attribution window at 14 days while starting the campaign.

Note: When you are starting the campaign ensures you capture most conversions for the campaign to have more learnings.

If a longer attribution window is better for campaign performance, why can’t we keep it longer all the time?

Because attribution window directly impacts conversions attributed to a campaign. A longer window will attribute more conversions to the campaign, which give the risk of including conversions to the campaigns that would have happened anyway.

The ultimate goal in choosing the right attribution window is to find a balance that accurately reflects the campaign’s impact while maximizing incrementally.

Attribution window & Incrementality

The holy grail of any marketing activity is to achieve incremental outcomes from the marketing efforts.

So, a proper attribution window should maximize the incrementality. If it is too long, we might attribute conversions that would have happened anyway, reducing the campaign's incrementality.

If it’s too short, you might miss conversions genuinely driven by your campaign, thereby undervaluing a campaign's efforts.

Attribution window & Marketing channels

Different channels have different optimal attribution windows.

For example, users from search marketing convert faster than users from social media channels. Search users are intent-driven, while social users are impulse-driven.

Hence, we have to use a shorter window for search campaigns and a longer window for social media campaigns to capture their impact accurately.

Right attribution window

If you have one core message from this article, just remember that the right attribution window for any campaign drives the maximum incremental outcome.

We can start the optimal level based on the product conversion window; however, you should keep optimizing it to maximize incremental conversions.