post-purchase attribution
Method of assigning credit for conversions in post-purchase scenarios.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is post-purchase attribution?
Post-purchase attribution is the practice of asking customers how they discovered your brand immediately after they complete a purchase. This is typically done through a short, one-question survey on the thank-you page. The primary goal is to gather valuable first-party data directly from the source, helping to validate the performance data from advertising platforms and uncover marketing channels that are difficult to track, such as word-of-mouth referrals, influencers, and 'dark social' (e.g., private messaging apps). This qualitative data provides a more holistic view of the customer journey, complementing quantitative data from analytics tools and enabling more informed marketing decisions.
How do you implement a post-purchase attribution survey?
Implementing a post-purchase attribution survey is a straightforward process. The most common method is to use a dedicated app or tool that integrates with your e-commerce platform, such as Shopify. These apps allow you to easily create and customize a survey that appears on the order confirmation page. The survey should be simple, typically asking a single open-ended or multiple-choice question like, 'How did you hear about us?' It is crucial to keep the survey brief to maximize completion rates. The collected data can then be analyzed to identify trends in customer acquisition and to inform your marketing budget allocation. Some popular tools for creating post-purchase surveys include Enquire, Fairing, and KnoCommerce.
What is the difference between post-purchase attribution and multi-touch attribution?
Post-purchase attribution and multi-touch attribution are two distinct approaches to understanding marketing effectiveness. Multi-touch attribution is a quantitative method that relies on tracking user interactions across various digital touchpoints (e.g., clicks on ads, website visits) to assign fractional credit for a conversion to each touchpoint. In contrast, post-purchase attribution is a qualitative method that directly asks customers to self-report how they discovered a brand. While multi-touch attribution provides a granular view of the digital customer journey, it often fails to capture offline influences or untrackable channels. Post-purchase attribution fills this gap by providing insights into these 'dark' channels, offering a valuable layer of customer-reported data to complement the data-driven insights from multi-touch models.
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