A multichannel model estimates how multiple marketing channels contribute to conversions, revenue, or other outcomes. It turns customer activity across email, social media, SMS, display ads, paid search, and offline media into directional guidance for investment decisions. section 7.7.1 section 7.7.4
Two approaches answer different investment questions:
- Multi-touch attribution (MTA) assigns conversion credit across user-level touchpoints. Linear attribution shares credit equally, time-decay favors recent interactions, and position-based attribution emphasizes the first and last interactions. section 7.7.4
- Media mix modeling (MMM) analyzes historical marketing spend and sales data across online and offline channels to estimate macro-level return on investment. section 7.7.4
- Both approaches help compare channel contributions and allocate budgets, but their correlational results do not provide granular proof of causation. section 7.7.1 section 7.7.4
A combined-touchpoint signal
A business might find that customers who click a personalized email and then see a targeted social advertisement convert at twice the rate of customers receiving only one touchpoint. That pattern identifies a promising combination for further investment, but experiments are needed to establish incremental causation. section 7.7.4 section 7.7.1
