What is Social Media Attribution?

Getting a full picture of how effective your marketing campaigns are—especially where digital marketing and social media are concerned—has not always been easy. But it is important because a lead generated or transaction are not the only measures of an effective campaign. 

Gaining a full understanding of the touchpoints along a customer journey, and how effective your marketing strategy has been, requires marketing attribution. Marketing attribution is a data-driven approach that allows you to see all the actions a customer takes throughout the customer journey, and provides you with attribution data that shows the effectiveness of each interaction^[1]. 

Social media attribution, as you probably guessed, is a subset of marketing attribution that focuses specifically on social media touchpoints. Just as with marketing attribution, social media attribution provides you with much more detail and performance metrics that let you understand which platforms your customers are using, as well as the types of content they tend to engage with^[2].

If you want to dive a little deeper into social media attribution, it’s a good idea to learn the attribution models, how attribution fits into your overall marketing efforts, and why it’s important to measure as many pieces of your social media marketing efforts as possible. 

What is social media attribution?

Social media attribution aims to do more than simply measure engagement on your social channels. Instead, social media attribution is designed to identify social media touchpoints at the top of your sales funnel, provide you with exact information about where customers have come from and how many times they’ve seen or interacted with your brand, and understand the true value of your various social media channels^[3]. 

From Facebook ads to TikTok videos and organic posts on LinkedIn, understanding the effectiveness of your social media marketing channels lets you know where your efforts are working, and where you can apply even more energy to increase everything from brand awareness to lead generation and sales. 

How does social media attribution work?

It’s important to note here that while they are similar, social media attribution and ROI are not the same, and they seek to measure slightly different things. “Return on investment” is truly a hard-and-fast measure of dollars that are coming in and how they compare with your expenditures in marketing. ROI is a data-driven approach to understanding the ratio between pricing and performance in terms of your advertising efforts. 

Social media attribution is similar but slightly different. Marketing attribution, and social media attribution specifically, aim to understand interactions beyond purchases. Attribution models allow you to assign values to each of your marketing channels regardless of whether a sale occurred or revenue was generated. 

The reason why attribution (for which there are several different models) is so important is because ROI often disregards how valuable things like email marketing, CRM, brand awareness campaigns, and other efforts can be as a part of your marketing funnel.

While the two terms are often used interchangeably in conversation, marketing attribution models are important for marketers who want to know and demonstrate the value of all of their efforts, including social media campaigns. 

What are the different types of social media attribution?

Attribution gives each of the touchpoints in your marketing a value, and there are several different types of attribution models for doing this. First, social media attribution is broken down into two approaches—single-touch and multi-touch attribution. 

Single-touch attribution puts all the weight of attribution on a particular touchpoint, such as a LinkedIn post or an ad on Twitter or Instagram^[4]. There are three types of single-touch attribution model—first click, lead conversion click, and last click. Again, single-touch attribution puts all the value on one of these points and assigns a value to it accordingly. 

Multi-touch attribution, as you probably guessed, deals with multiple different touchpoints instead. This approach measures all of the points of contact with a customer or lead—including first touchpoint (or first interaction), last touchpoint (last interaction)—and gives a value to each.

The multi-touch model lets your marketing team really understand how all of your social media efforts are interacting, from Facebook to blog to landing page to email signup and so on^[5]. 

There are several different multi-touch attribution models: linear attribution model (which gives equal credit to each touchpoint); descending; U-shaped; W-shaped; and full path. While there is a lot to cover about each of those, a simple explanation is that linear attribution gives equal weight to every touchpoint, and the other models strike a different balance of credit depending on the approach. 

Why is social media attribution important for marketers?

Since attribution is a big part of your overarching ROI analysis, and because it lets you optimize your marketing efforts and strategy that is already up and running, it’s incredibly valuable for marketers.

Whether you choose a last-touch attribution model, first-touch attribution model, or any of the other options that are available to you, the importance of social media attribution extends far beyond social media platforms and your social media management team.

Social media attribution provides valuable information about your overall marketing touchpoints and their full effectiveness, helping you understand better how your social networks really fit into the full picture of your marketing channels. 

The many benefits of social media attribution (and marketing attribution overall) include: 

• A more comprehensive understanding of ROI: Social is one of your many marketing expenses, but understanding how valuable it is can be a genuine challenge (as anyone in social media management can tell you). Attribution fills out this missing information in your overall ROI measurement and provides actionable data you can optimize with^[6].
• Campaign optimization: Speaking of data you can optimize with, social media attribution really lets you look under the hood and understand what things are working and how they work together. This way you can turn up the dials where it makes the most sense.
• Better for customer: Attribution tells you where your customers are and what they like to engage with, allowing you to give them more of what they want (and what works!). 
• More accurate social media analytics: Numbers are great, but there’s little you can do with your basic analytics data unless you get a complete understanding of them. This is where social media attribution comes in. 

How do you track social media attribution?

Tracking social media attribution is much like tracking and measuring your other marketing efforts. There are specific sources of data and several tools available to help you get started. First and foremost, you need to be bringing in data from Google Analytics, Twitter website tags, LinkedIn insight tags, Facebook pixels, any UTMs you have created, and so on. 

One of the good things about attribution is that you do not have to stop or restart any of your current efforts. Instead, marketing attribution and social media attribution models are designed to help you understand how things are performing right at this moment.

This information can then help you decide where and how to ramp things up. Whether that be more video content for LinkedIn, additional email newsletters with relevant content, or more frequent ad placement on Facebook, attribution helps you adjust and put your energy (and budget) where it will do the most good. 

Tools for tracking social media attribution

These pieces then fold in with your other marketing data, such as website and app visits/downloads, landing page visits, CRM signups, and so on. In order to combine all of this information, there are numerous different attribution tools that marketers can choose from to measure their social media attribution.

Most of these tools will allow you to utilize either of the methods described above. But you may want to dive into each one and understand just how much measurement, control, and flexibility you can get based on your goals or needs. 

Making social media do more for your business

There’s no question that social media can be a powerful and valuable tool to help small businesses reach customers, engage in conversations, and build their brand. As a tool for direct connections with customers and an outlet for effective content marketing, social media sites can help keep companies on top of their customers’ minds.

But understanding what works, what doesn’t, and what your social media marketing efforts are worth are critical to making efficient and effective use of all the options available. 

Whether you are looking for help developing a comprehensive set of social media goals for your business, or you have a marketing strategy in place and want to better understand your results through attribution, connect with a social media provider through the UpCity Marketplace. 

There are countless examples of firms that offer expertise in marketing attribution, including the development and implementation of social media attribution for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

This article was originally published August 6, 2020 and has since been updated.