This content was originally published in the No Best Practices newsletter on 07.30.2023.
The most common mistake I see DTC brands make when it comes to marketing attribution: trying to shoehorn their attribution model into a Google Analytics-style “what channel gets the credit?” framework.
Why is this a problem? Because consumer demand is an ecosystem, and different channels play different roles in influencing that ecosystem. In fact, many of the causative factors are random and entirely outside your control.
When you’re zoomed in on “what channel gets the credit?”, you tend to measure the wrong things. What you should be asking yourself is “I think that if I do A, the result will be B. Is that accurate?”
Here is a simple example: