In the Google Analytics world, the ingredients for attribution are quite straightforward. You need to make sure to measure as many sessions as possible. You need to make sure most of these sessions have some kind of source information, be it UTM parameters or referrers.  You need to track at least one conversion event. And then you have it all in Google Analytics. What is left for you is to pick an attribution model. And even this does not really happen anymore with the dominant data-driven attribution model.

But there is a world beyond that. I will lay it out in more detail in the following three points. The gist is that you collect a lot more about your users, accounts, and customers. And here we discover our first concept that often does not show up in attribution.

### From conversion-centric to user/account-centric

In the Google Analytics world, but also in most custom attribution model setups, I saw everything centered around campaigns (or ads or channels - pick your level of abstraction; I am using campaign now as the generic term for all levels) and a conversion event. How does a campaign convert? That is the central question of attribution. So it makes sense that you center everything around the one conversion you want to measure for your campaigns.

What is often a next level is to add customer lifetime value at some point.

But why don't we treat customer, account, or user as our center from the first place? Very few businesses are built around one conversion.

I will use user as a catch-all term for account and customer, to keep things from getting too complex. And user is nice because we can try to define them quite early.

When we put the user at the center of our attribution, we are expanding a whole journey of relevant touchpoints and conversions (multiple, different kinds of conversions). This unlocks multiple use cases, but the one I want to focus on here is what kind of touchpoints we can pick beyond the classic "session started" touchpoint.

### Surveys, CRMs, or other third-party sources can hold relevant data

What is nice about the "session started" touchpoint? It has a great data setup. It has a timestamp (very important); it can hold information about where the user was before arriving on our website (UTMs or referrer), and we can model a session to even fine-tune the whole setup. Of course, this is an important part of our setup.

But there is more.

One of our favorite other data points is the "How did you hear about us" data point. You will hear us talking about it in most of our talks since it is one of the easiest to measure marketing touchpoints you can get.

Wait, did you say touchpoint? But a survey is not really a touchpoint, is it? It's different from a session start.

Not so much when we take two steps back. A survey submission has a timestamp (yeah), and people provide where they heard about us, which we can treat as source information. So we have all things we together to officially call it a touchpoint (double yeah).

Why would we do that?

Because we want to collect a rich set of touchpoints that all define this user's journey. And we define a touchpoint like we just did. A timestamp and source information (there are some more, but we keep the simple ones here). Because the more we can bring together, the more options we have to decide how we want to attribute. See, it is not just about using server-side tagging to get these 2% more sessions.

With that established, I am pretty sure you get some more ideas.

What about all the emails you sent? We have an email, which is a solid identifier; we have a timestamp, and we know the source, which is this email. Identifier is also an important concept of the user-centric model, but it deserves a post of its own.

What about event attendance, what about discount usage,...

Ok, I think you get that idea.

### A holistic touchpoint and journey model

What changes attribution is not 2% more tracking on your website; it is using a different holistic model than a campaign and a conversion. We'd better use the most holistic model we can get: the user/customer journey.

Because it has the richest history and it goes all the way into the future. And it gives us more to work with than just a session started.

Our marketing happens in so many places now that the website is just one of them. And sometimes not even the main one. So we need to move beyond an attribution model that puts website sessions and conversion at its center.

A user journey model does not come together easily. We introduced some parts in this post today: what a touchpoint can be. But we left some big elephants alone: identity measurement and resolution, aggregated source, and more. But this is something for future posts.