Salesforce Campaign Attribution allows marketers to accurately attribute the influence of their Marketing/Sales campaigns to revenue. While there are many different attribution models out there, we’ll explore the difference between a Percent-Based Attribution Model vs a Point-Based Attribution Model in this post. I will also explain why everyone should adopt a Point-Based Attribution Model and why it’s more fair than a Percent-Based Attribution Model.
Suppose you have a wedding and you are deciding on how to slice the wedding cake. You want to give bigger slices to your best man and maid of honor, but you still want everyone else to have a piece. In a Percent-Based Model, you are immediately reserving a certain percentage of the cake for your best man and maid of honor and dividing the remaining piece among all the guests. In other words, the amount of cake reserved for your best man and maid of honor is fixed and will not change based on the number of guests. With a Point-Based Model however, the wedding cake is not sliced until every guest has showed up, so the slice allocated for your best man and maid of honor will be relative to the number of guests that show up.
The following diagram illustrates how a $1,000 Opportunity (our wedding cake) and its revenue (cake slices) will be allocated for a Percentage-Based Model vs a Point-Based Model Attribution Model (with extra points for Contact Roles).
In both Example 1 and 2 (above), Campaign A and B were the First and Primary touches respectively. Example 2 has twice as many Campaign Touches as Example 1 and illustrates how a Point-based model is a more fair Campaign Attribution model, especially when there are many Campaign Touches that contributed to the Closed Opportunity.
In the Percentage-based 40-20-40 model, Campaign A and B (the first and primary touches) were allocated a percentage of the Opportunity amount with the remainder divided among the other touches whereas in the Point-based model, the amount allocated to Campaign A and B is dependent on the number of touches. As opposed to the Percentage-based model where Campaign A and B would be attributed $400 each regardless of the number of touches, the Point-based model is more fair to campaign touches because an increased number of touches would slightly decrease the amount allocated to Campaign A and B.
If we go back to our wedding cake analogy, it would make sense to allocate more of the best man/maid of honors’ reserved cake to the guests if there were a lot of guests. I mean, if you were the best man or maid of honor, wouldn’t you want everyone else to have more cake? (After all, the best man/maid of honor would still have more cake than each of the guests.)
