With so many possibilities available to advertisers, it can be challenging to sift through and figure out which ads are most effective in realizing their marketing goals. Marketers are finding difficulty pinpointing which ads should be discontinued, which need to be optimized and which need to be prioritized. This is where attribution models come in to play, because it’s next to impossible to run efficient and effective ads if the source of conversions is a guessing game. Users often interact with multiple ads before a conversion takes place and attribution models are used to assign how much credit each ad interaction receives. It is important to note that attribution modeling in Google Ads is only available for Search Network and Shopping ads. In this series we will dive into different attribution models.

The default attribution model is Last Click Attribution. This gives 100% of the credit to the ad and associated keyword that were clicked last by a user on their way to a conversion. Let’s say a psychologist is advertising online with their most desired conversion being an email from the contact page on their website. A user types in “psychologist near me”, clicks on the psychologist’s ad and sees they do therapy for anxiety. The next day they type in “therapy for anxiety”, click on an ad put up by the same psychologist and then they send an email setting up an appointment. Last click will give all of the credit for the email to the keyword “therapy for anxiety” and the ad associated with it. Last click is great for seeing which campaigns are pumping out the most conversions, which is very useful information. The campaigns that cause the most conversions are often where marketers want to focus their attention. The downside of this model is that it ignores other ad interactions that may have been important in contributing to the conversion. With this model the psychologist would only have known that “therapy for anxiety” was responsible for the conversion without knowing that the initial interaction that brought first exposure was “psychologist near me”. If an automated bidding strategy like Target CPA, ECPC, or Target ROAS is being used, the attribution model will influence the way bids are optimized. Google has a “Model Comparison” feature that allows for side by side comparison of different models.

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