4 Amazing Facts Your Attribution Model Probably Ignores

Some of the most powerful weapons in your marketing arsenal might not get enough credit. You understand these tools are important to your endeavors, or you wouldn’t work so hard at keeping your various social media accounts current. Still, when it comes time to study the metrics and analyze where your traffic comes from, the numbers may be disappointing. After all, many attribution models fail to make allowances for first-touch and assists when determining the reason for conversion.

Facebook Still Rules Ecommerce

According to statistics compiled by RichRelevance, Facebook accounts for 4.31 million online shopping sessions and maintains a 60% share of ecommerce traffic. Targeted ads and promoted posts obviously go a long way toward getting your products in the public eye. Still, 57.6% of marketers say they use the last-click attribution model—the very last click a user makes before buying—which undervalues a Facebook ad by 12%.

Pinterest Is Crazy Hot

A first-touch attribution model really leaves Pinterest out in the cold. Did you know 50% of website visits happen 3.5 months after a product from that site is pinned? Not only that, but also an average of 6 page views are attributed to each pin. By using the first-touch attribution model, you could really undervalue Pinterest’s contribution. What this also tells us, however, is that the half-life of pins is significantly longer than those of other social platforms.

Polyvore Is Your Secret, Secret Weapon

It’s not often you have a weapon so secret that you don’t even know about it. With all the attention Pinterest and Facebook get, Polyvore is often—or always, however you want to look at it—forgotten. If your attribution model doesn’t account for this social platform, you’ll miss the fact that Polyvore actually holds a 20% share of the traffic—higher than darling Pinterest’s 15%. What’s more, Polyvore users average orders of $383 per shopping session, outstripping Facebook’s $199.

Twitter Might Not Be So Cool After All

Twitter’s like the cool cousin who has a bunch of amazing friends but doesn’t seem to do much else besides party. Teens have recently decided the social network is more important than Facebook, but popularity doesn’t always win the prize. When it comes to ecommerce, Twitter comes in last for every category, with only .32 million shopping sessions as compared to Facebook’s 4.31 million. Still, this loud, chatty cousin does help to spread the word, so its role as an assist should always be counted.

If you’re not using a sophisticated attribution model, these are facts you may never have known. One in two marketers claim they manage all social media in house, without the aid of an external provider. Even more shocking, 24.2% don’t track these metrics at all. What else could you learn about the weapons in your arsenal by adopting a more sophisticated attribution model?