Attribution: Why Pixel Data and Google Analytics Don’t Always Match Up

September 9, 2020 –

Pixels + Google Analytics tracking is a very important piece to ensuring success on your digital media campaigns. Today, we can only track user behavior up to a certain extent; privacy laws are making it harder and harder by the day. The point is, tracking is imperfect, but it’s pretty good and vital to any digital program’s success.
The default settings by each platform are fine, but based on your business you may want to adjust.
Scenario #1: If your business sells something that takes some consideration, your look-back window may need to be extended from 30 days to 90 days.
Scenario #2: If your customer does shopping and research before making a decision (most do) then you might want to consider changing your Google Ads attribution model from Last Click to Position Based. Position Based modeling gives 40% of credit to both the first and last click, and distributes 20% among other clicks. This allows some credit to go to those upper funnel keywords that got your customer interested and some credit to those that converted them in the end when it was time to make a decision.
Scenario #3: Again, if your consumer takes time to make their decision, maybe we can allocate some more credit to Facebook view through conversions if it occurred after 7 days instead of the standard 1 day.
How do you know if you are giving the right attribution? YOU DON’T!
We’ll never know 100% which ad should get how much credit, but diving into the data and making educated analysis paired with business knowledge and real-world trends we can develop our best assumptions. 81 & Sunny loves digging into these data points and helping clients uncover key details on how their campaigns are performing. Message us if you are interested in hearing more!
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