Attribution Types

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Able uses either built-in or external attribution to fix attribution problems when sending events to external services. This page explains the differences and algorithms used by different attribution types.

Built-in attribution

Own Able attribution is a first-touch attribution used to determine original source of the customer using first-party data stored by Able Customer Data Platform. It is used to send attribution data to platforms that don't have built-in attribution or when it needs to be supplemented. For example, to CRM and marketing automation platforms such as ActiveCampaign and Salesforce, as well as to display sources of customers in the Dashboard. Custom multi-touch attribution using first-party data can be implemented with BI tools using the BigQuery Connector.

Source of the first known customer activity is used to determine attribution of the customer and generates following parameters:

Landing Page (landing_page)
Referrer URL (referrer_url)
UTM Source (utm_source)
UTM Medium (utm_medium)
UTM Campaign (utm_campaign)
UTM Term (utm_term)
UTM Content (utm_content)

Built-in integrations usually send them as custom fields. In that's the case, custom fields typically need to be pre-created. Once the fields are created, attribution parameters are mapped automatically, by comparing parameter name in the external system with the name listed above. Detailed instructions are available in the setup instructions for each integration.

External attribution

Able fixes attribution problems in external services such as Google Analytics, Facebook Ads or Google Ads by attributing conversions to the earliest known external identifier (Google Analytics Client Id, Facebook click and browser id etc) rather than the current one. This approach eliminates false 'direct' and unattributed conversions from the reports.

For example. for a Google Analytics tracked visit and purchase it might look like this:

A customer visits the website and signs up or starts the purchase, leaving contact details. Google Analytics assign Client Id A to the visitor.
Customer completes the purchase later, possibly, without cookies, so that Google Analytics will assign a new Client Id B with direct/none attribution.
Able uses first-party customer data to determine that it is the same customer that visited the website the first time, sending the Client Id A along with the purchase conversion to Google Analytics Measurement Protocol, resulting in the conversion being attributed to the correct source in the reports.

This allows to make sure that external reporting tools always know the earliest activity of the customer and can attribute the conversion to them, while leaving the custom attribution settings available for configuration.

This is only possible when back-end first-party customer data are combined with front-end tracking to reconstruct complete customer journeys.

For details on applicable settings, see integration setup guides or details on the external services websites: