Looking at Attribution Across Various Web Analytics Platforms
Previously, I blogged about attribution in Google (Google Analytics Helpful Tip – Changing Campaign Attribution) and Omniture (Leveraging Allocations to Create Keyword Groupings in Omniture SearchCenter). Today, I want to dive further into that discussion but also bring into the fold a new analytics and insight tool called Convertro.
Convertro is a platform that moves past the basic cookie tracking functionality. They are able to show more meaningful data sets that is more accurate than cookie based systems. With cookie based systems, you have to worry about cookie deletion, ability to accurately track across cross-domains as well as other issues.
Lets take a look at how each tool: Coremetrics, Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst and Convertro handles attribution.
Omniture SiteCatalyst
Attribution is handled on a last touch point bases out of the box. What that means is that the last marketing item that a user clicks on prior to conversion will get credited for the conversion. While this provides a nice way to see what was the last thing that truly influenced a user to convert, it doesn’t show the complete path that was taken by the user. Within the admin interface, you can adjust the settings to either follow a first, last or linear allocation. First simply means that the first item that influenced the user to come to the site will get credited for the conversion even if there were several subsequent touches after-wards. Linear attribution spreads or divides the event/metric across the various touchpoints. This can also be achieved by leveraging the cross visit participation plugin that you can get from Engineering Services.
The downside to this is that for whatever flavor you want, you will need to go into the interface and set up each variable to perform the way you want. So in theory, if you don’t leverage Engineering Services for a paid solution, you will need to burn 3 variables for each (and if you are like me and short on variables, this option won’t work).
Coremetrics
Attribution is handled on a last touch point bases out of the box. Coremetrics doesn’t provide the customization option that Omniture provides so adjusting variables to perform on different allocation mixes isn’t going to happen (that is without paying additional monies for this functionality). Coremetrics does, however, provide a way (albeit a hack) via their MMC and SP variable to “add” in when touchpoints occurred. The negative to this is you will need to reallocate one of the placeholders within their tag to serve a new purpose and potentially will have to rework the other tags to conform to new nomenclature.
Google Analytics
Like the others, google analytics is set up to track the last touch point out of the box. However, via the utm_nooverride query parameter, you can set GA to track either first or last touchpoint. All you need to do is adjust the destination URL and make sure that you have utm_nooverride=1 for first or omit it for last. However, if you want to see all touches that drove to the conversion, Google Analytics won’t be able to provide that for you without some custom variable tracking (i.e. you would need to burn several variables to capture the touchpoint value for each step in separate variables so they don’t step on each other).
Convertro
Convertro doesn’t limit its users to a first, last or linear flavor. Out of the box it has all three enabled and all a user needs to do is log into the interface and toggle between the various touchpoints (see below).
The great thing I like about this new tool is that you don’t need to do any customization for many of these great features to work. All you need to do is drop the snippet of code within the predefined spots and you are good to go. No longer do you need to add a unique page tag to each and every page to ensure uniqueness and accuracy in reporting.
If you haven’t heard of Convertro, I recommend you look into it. For many customers, it will be a god-send 
Written by:
Dorian D. Regester
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Good summary. I would check back with Coremetrics regarding attribution. I believe they do offer First, Last and Averaged attribution settings within their standard analytics offering. In fact, I think they were the first analytics vendor to do so. Cross-Visit Participation, for example, in Site Catalyst was released just recently.
The Converto “toggle” functionality between Attribution methods does look very user-friendly!
Great information! I’ve been looking for something like this for a while now. Thanks!