Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) Report FAQ [BETA]

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Dora Kishinevsky
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Singular's MTA report is in limited beta, offered only to customers who use Singular for website attribution. If you are interested in this feature, contact your Singular Customer Success Manager.

Multi-touch attribution (MTA) is an attribution method in which credit is given to multiple touchpoints involved in the customer journey.

Instead of attributing the conversion to the last ad that the end-user interacted with prior to the conversion (a model known as last-touch attribution), credit is distributed between various ads that the user engaged with prior to the conversion. This helps you:

  • Get a better understanding of the user journey.
  • Get better visibility into the performance of upper- and mid-funnel channels, so you can optimize and allocate budgets accordingly.

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Singular's new MTA report (beta) lets you analyze your campaign performance based on several different MTA models. For example, the linear model gives equal credit to all touchpoints in the user journey, while the U model emphasizes the first and the last touchpoints. Choose the model that gives you the best picture of the contribution made by each of your campaigns.

FAQ

What is multi-touch attribution (MTA)?

Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) is an attribution method in which credit is given to multiple touchpoints involved in the customer journey.

Instead of attributing the conversion to the last ad that the end-user interacted with prior to the conversion (a model known as last-touch attribution), credit is distributed between various ads that the user engaged with prior to the conversion.

In multi-touch attribution, if a user watched an ad for a website on Instagram, then the next day watched an ad for the same website on Twitter, and finally browsed to the website that evening - all of these touchpoints can receive a part of the credit for the conversion.

Note: Singular's new MTA report is an extra analysis tool for advertisers, offered to complement our main reporting features. Singular uses last-touch attribution in our main attribution mechanism (see Understanding Singular Attribution to learn more).

Who can benefit from MTA?

Some advertisers who benefit from MTA data are:

  • Advertisers with brand awareness goals.
  • Advertisers with a long conversion cycle, where the user journey often includes several different channels.

Organizations looking to optimize marketing budget allocations in the context of a multi-touchpoint conversion cycle.

When and how does Singular provide MTA?

MTA gives you a complementary view of your marketing campaign performance, letting you see the relative contribution of all the touchpoints that might have been involved in your users' conversion journeys.

In MTA, how is attribution distributed among the different touchpoints?

There are different models for dividing the credit for the conversion between multiple touchpoints. Each model has its own use cases.

The models offered by Singular's MTA report are:

  • Linear Attribution:
  • First-Touch Attribution
  • Last-Touch Attribution
  • U Model
  • Time Decay

For a description of each model and tips for choosing the right one, see How do I choose an MTA attribution model?

How do I choose an MTA attribution model?

Each model has its own benefits and drawbacks. See the tips below.

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Last-Touch Model

All credit goes to the last touchpoint before the conversion.
  • This model disregards the user journey in favor of down-funnel channels such as Apple Search or Google Ads.
  • Useful if your product has a short marketing journey and/or you want to focus on the channels that lead directly to conversion.
mta-first-touch.png

First-Touch Model

All credit goes to the first touchpoint in the user journey.
  • Relevant if one of your marketing goals is brand awareness: this model lets you know which channels were the first to introduce customers to your brand. 
  • Can also be used to evaluate top-of-the-funnel performance when combined with other models that represent the whole user journey.
mta-linear.png

Linear Model

Credit is distributed equally among all the touchpoints.
  • Helps track the customer conversion path, giving an overview of all the channels involved and how each of them is performing.
  • Helps understand where marketing efforts are paying off.
  • Highly useful for gathering data about the user journey and how many/what types of campaigns the user engages with before they are converted.
mta-u-model.png

U Model

40% of the credit goes to the first touchpoint, 40% to the last, and the other 20% divided equally between the middle touchpoints.
  • Helps optimize the top and bottom touchpoints in the user journey.
  • Best suited for advertisers who already understand their users' behavior.
  • Note that if the customer journey is very long, each of the middle touchpoints gets a very low amount of credit. This may create a misleading picture, failing to take into account the impact of awareness-building channels such as social media or SEO.
mta-time-decay.png

Time Decay

Distributes the credit for the conversion between all the touchpoints based on the number of days that elapsed from the touchpoint to the conversion.
  • Emphasizes the channels that lead directly to conversion.
  • Gives a broader view than the last-touch model by adding information about channels that helped create/improve brand awareness.
  • An example use case is a product with a long user journey and a strong call-to-action converter down the funnel, such as a discount promo code.
What data is provided in the MTA report? How do I read it?

Singular's MTA report gives you the number of conversions attributed to each source (partner network) according to the MTA model you selected.

For example, the following report shows how many conversions are attributed to each media source based on the U Model.

mta-report-example.png

In this beta phase, the report is only available as a downloadable CSV file.

The report is broken down by:

Dimension Description
App The promoted website.
Conversion Event The event (as received from the Singular Website SDK) being measured. You can only choose one conversion event per report.
Conversion Event Date The date on which the event occurred. The data in this report is always broken down per day.
OS  
Country  
Source The ad network or other partner that served the ad
Campaign Name & ID The campaign name and ID Singular gets from the Singular Link.
UTM Parameters If the advertiser added UTM parameters to the Singular Link, e.g., UTM Source or UTM Campaign, they are displayed here.
How do I run an MTA report?
1

In the Singular platform, go to Analytics > Multi-Touch.

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2 Select the App and App Site you want to analyze.
3 Choose a date range of 1-7 days. These are the dates on which the conversion event occurred. The earliest date you can select is 30 days ago.
4 Choose the conversion event from the dropdown list. Note that these are the event names as reported by the Singular SDK in your website (not the events defined in Settings > Events).
5 Choose the MTA model you want to use and click Download CSV. The resulting report file will display the aggregated contribution of each ad network or other media source to your conversions.
What are the limits of the MTA report?

In this current beta:

  • MTA is offered for web properties only.
  • We only offer the report as a downloadable CSV file.
  • Each report is for one event and one MTA model.
  • The touchpoints considered for attribution are clicks only (not views).
  • Time ranges:
    • The lookback window for touchpoints leading to a conversion event is 30 days.
    • You can only look at conversions that happened in the last 30 days.