Attribution. The new golden buzz word in digital marketing. So many companies have been trying to figure out the perfect attribution modeling tool to help advertisers allocate their ad dollars as effectively as possible. I have QA’ed many tools and they all have their drawbacks. Facebook’s new attribution tool though might be the best one I have seen thus far. In this blog post, we will go through some of the main benefits and then how you can implement it for your business.

Before we dive in, for those of you that don’t know lets go over what attribution is. Attribution is the process of identifying a set of user actions across touchpoints that contribute to a desired outcome, and the assigning a value to each of these events. Traditionally the main attribution window that was used to determine success was “Last-Click” attribution which means that the last ad that the user clicked get all the credit for the desired outcome that took place.

The main issue with this attribution model is that that it on average takes a user 6-8 interactions before buying something from a new brand. So the other 5-7 touches that contributed to the desired outcome get not credit and typically get scaled back on, but scaling back on these “ineffective channels” could be detrimental to your overall performance. Facebook states that “45% of digital touchpoints are missed by traditional measurement”. This is where attribution modeling comes in. It is an attempt to provide an appropriate value to all touchpoints in the consumer journey. With the appropriate value attributed to all touchpoints, you will be able to educatedly scale certain channels to have the biggest impact on your ROI.

Now lets walk through how you can set this up for your business and start having a more holistic view of your marketing efforts.

Step 1

Navigate to the Facebook Attribution Tool in your Business Manager.

Step 2

Once you get their for the first time, you will get this pop up:

Step 3: Click Get Started

Step 4: Set Up Line of Business

1. Facebook will ask you how your business is organized? Single Business; Multiple Brands, Verticals, or Regions; or an Agency. In layman’s terms it is asking if you have a singular ad account for your one business, if you run multiple brands out of your business manager as a multiple business owner, or if you run multiple businesses at of your business manager as an agency
2. Once you have selected your business type you will have to assign all of the assets and data sources associated with your business.
3. When you are done, click “Confirm” at the bottom right. You will now have a brief summary of everything you just added.

Now, your Facebook attribution is all setup, but to get the full power of this tool you will want all of your traffic sources to be pulling into this tool. In order to do that, you are going to want to navigate to the Ad Platform tab.

Step 5

You now have the ability to choose from 37 other Ad Platforms. Some of the more notable include Google Ads, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Bing Ads. Also, if a platform that you advertise on is not included in this list, you are able to manually add a custom connection.

Some of the platforms are preconfigured and a little easier to setup than others. Here is a tutorial that details the configurations in more detail: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/280061242391284

You should now be all good to go! Please note that the data will not be in there right away. The data will now accumulate from the date that you set it up. Once you have data accumulated you will start to see all the reporting capabilities that the this new tool has. You can rabbit hole with this tool for days with all of the capabilities that it has. We will be checking back in with what we have found most valuable, so stay tuned and happy hunting!