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What is Source Medium Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)?

Our model provides a comprehensive view of how various marketing efforts contribute to customer purchases. By unifying data from multiple sources of first party data you already own, we construct detailed purchase journeys that help you understand the impact of different marketing channels, landing pages, and ad creatives.

In the sections below, this document will provide everything you need to know to get started with Source Medium MTA.

If you have a specific question and you’d like to skip the overview guide, check out our MTA FAQs or use the AI-enabled search bar above to quickly find what you’re looking for.
If you’re already familiar with Source Medium MTA data and you’d like to explore how to use our built-in reporting, skip ahead to Section 3. For a verbose technical explanation, skip ahead to our MTA Advanced Documentation.
1

What composes multi-touch attribution data and how is it described?

Marketing interactions happen with customers in the form of touch points—many touch points make up a purchase journey, and many purchase journeys make up a multi-touch attribution data set. Click the tabs below to read more about each of these concepts.

  • A touch point is an event, occurring before a purchase, where an interaction with a customer is made and touch point data is captured
  • Touch point data must contain at least one of the following to be considered valid: a landing page, an ad creative, or a marketing channel (mapped UTM data)
  • Add to carts, purchases, and confirmations are touch points, but they are not the primary focus of the Source Medium MTA model as they do not provide attribution insights
  • Touch points are only valid within the lookback window, which is 120 days before the customer makes their purchase
2

Where Does Multi-Touch Attribution Data Come From, and How is it Modeled?

Source Medium MTA takes multiple data sources reporting many customer journeys, unifies them into a single schema and assesses their quality, then combines the best of those purchase journeys with Marketing Data, Orders Data, Customer Data, and User Inputs to create a Unified Purchase Journey Dataset. View this process in the figure below.

  1. Source Medium integrates first-party purchase funnel data from a variety of data sources, you’ll see them listed and categorized on the left-hand side of the chart above
  2. The purchase journeys from all data sources are assessed for quality by number of valid touch points and the best are selected, this creates the Unified Event Schema you’ll see in the middle of the chart
  3. The Unified event Schema is combined with Marketing Data, Orders Data, Customer Data, and User Inputs using the appropriate identifier matching for each to create a set of Unified Purchase Journeys which you’ll see on the right-hand side of the chart
Architecture and modeling is explained in greater detail in our MTA Advanced Documentation
3

How can I Analyze Source Medium Multi-Touch Data?

Source Medium MTA data architecture and modeling powers a robust suite of detailed reports to help you analyze and optimize your marketing efforts. If desired, you can customize these MTA reports for your use case—and you can even build custom BI solutions or train machine learning models directly on top of the Unified Purchase Journey MTA data from your managed data warehouse.

If you’re already familiar with Source Medium MTA, or you’d like to just get started with analysis, feel free to skip the Reporting Definitions below and move ahead to the MTA Built-in Reports section.

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