Purchase Conversions and Attribution Modeling in Online Advertising: An Empirical Investigation

In a purchase funnel, a consumer may interact with an assortment of ad platforms ranging from display ads, paid search and organic search to social media and email. In this study, we consider attribution models that can be applied to assign sales credit to these and other online channels. Using an online firm’s conversion data, we investigate the commonly used the lastclick attribution model and compare its results to a cooperative game theory based (Shapley Value) attribution model. Our findings show that individual rewards vary significantly for different online channels under these two models. We also compute contributions of the various estimated factors using the Shapley Value regression approach in order to decompose a consumer funnel by regressed sources. Our empirical research provides insights into the complexity of attribution modeling.