03-19-2018 02:49 PM - edited 02-09-2024 11:39 AM
Marketing Data is a powerful tool in your Invoca account that allows you to capture information about your callers. However, you may not want all of that information treated the same way, especially if one Marketing Data field has the opportunity to collect more than one value.
For example, if you have created a custom Marketing Data field that tracks which landing page drove your phone call, you probably want to track the last URL your customer viewed before calling. On the other hand, if you want to measure the effectiveness of your ads at bringing customers to your landing page, you probably want to track the first URL your customer visited. Thankfully, you can use Invoca to track both — but you'll need to utilize our different Marketing Data attribution models to do so. Here's an explanation of these different models and how they work:
This attribution model stores the most recent value that your Invoca Tag captures in your customer's session — any new value for that your Tag captures will replace the value for this field. "Last touch" attribution is most useful for capturing data such as the last page that the visitor called from, or which campaign ID was last presented.
Here's an illustration of the Last Touch attribution model. In this example, a visitor's first time on your landing page was driven by a direct link. Invoca captures the value "direct" for this visitor's Marketing Data utm_medium and utm_source. That same person then visits your landing page a second time — this time driven by a Google Ad. Invoca overwrites that visitor's previous utm_medium and utm_source values as "paid" and "google", respectively.
However, if you configure your Invoca Tag to turn off the "reset attribution cache" or "capture organic sources" settings, this behavior can change. See our guide How to configure and deploy your Invoca Tag to learn more.
If your Invoca Tag captures a value for a "last touch" Marketing Data field, but your customer's subsequent page views do not have that parameter (not mentioned or null or empty string), the last value will not be overwritten.
This attribution model stores the first value that your Invoca Tag captures in your customer's session — subsequent page views will not update the value for this field. The value captured will persist until the cookie lifetime has expired (or the cache is otherwise reset).
"First touch" attribution is most useful for capturing initial referring data, such as a referring URL, ad keyword, or creative asset.
This attribution model stores each value that your Invoca Tag captures (with a maximum of 35 values, and 255 total characters). New values are added to the same phone number being displayed, separated by commas. Empty values are not stored, and if the same value is sent multiple times in a row it is not appended.
If your Invoca Tag captures more values for a "multi-touch" Marketing Data field than Invoca can store, we will truncate the middle most value, to ensure we always capture the first and last values.
For Example:
If capturing the page name with "Multi" attribution, and the user visits the following pages:
A → B → B → C → A
The following attribution will be stored:
"A, B, C, A"
Multi-touch values are captured based on the life of the Invoca cookie, making it possible for values to be captured across visitor sessions. There are a few factors at play to determine the cookie lifetime:
- The "Attribution Window" set in your Invoca Tag designates the maximum life of the cookie
- The browser the customer uses. Some browsers, like Safari and Firefox, have privacy policies that will clear cookies after 1-7 days.
- Whether or not the customer has a re-set attribution cache rule in the Invoca Tag. Re-setting the attribution cache will clear out all values captured and start fresh.
- Whether or not the end-visitor manually clears their cookies prior to calling
In sum, if the Invoca cookie is removed or expired, attribution will start fresh the next time the visitor visits your website.
Example Use Cases:
What is the path this visitor took before calling?
I.e. capture the URL pathname on each page
Reports would show: "landing_page, about_us, contact"
Custom events that are triggered by the user before calling (requires custom JavaScript to capture and trigger InvocaJS to run again)
"Clicked learn-more, watched video 123, searched on help page"
This attribution type is reserved for Invoca system fields, such as the Invoca ID and detected destination numbers. Any new values received for one of these fields will result in a new phone number, which is why we recommend keeping only the Invoca ID set to unique in your Invoca Tag.
Your Invoca account already includes one unique field, invoca_id, as part of your Standard Data package — if you have previously created Unique data fields for other customer IDs or session IDs such as from Adobe Analytics or other first- or third-party tools, we now recommend setting these to Last Touch to keep your phone number usage low and your attribution as complete as possible.