AdWords Advertising Moving Beyond Last-Click Attribution

Advertisers that believe customers that see their advertisement one time will immediately purchase are naive at best.

Today's consumers often go through an exceedingly long buying journey, one filled with research, reviews and brand interaction long before ever formally hitting the buy button.

For that reason, last-click attribution can't and doesn't ever tell the whole story. Fortunately, the savviest advertisers are moving beyond last-click attribution.

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Back in 2014, Google released the Attribution Modeling Tool in AdWords, which made it possible for advertisers to gain insights about how users interacted with their ads. Soon, those same advertisers will be able to integration the attribution model of their choice with conversion and bidding data. That's pretty big.

Advertisers will soon be able to select one of six different attribution models for each conversion type -- last click, first click, linear, time decay, position-based, or data driven. When you pick a new model, credit will be reassigned across the conversion path for all search or shopping ad clicks on Google.com, and your conversion stats will change moving forward. You can adjust bids based on your new way of counting conversions, and if you’re using automated bidding for search ads, your bids will be optimized automatically to reflect your new model.

Unlike rules-based models, data driven attribution uses machine learning to evaluate all the converting and non-converting paths across your account and identifies the proper credit for each interaction. The model considers the number of ad interactions, order of exposure, ad creative, and many other factors to determine which keywords and clicks are the most effective at driving results.

Advertisers will be able to select new attribution model in Analytics 360, Attribution 360 and DoubleClick.