Media attribution is the assignment of a percentage weight to each media touchpoint a consumer is exposed to prior to purchasing. Many firms consider using attribution to allocate media budgets, particularly for digital media, but an important question is whether this is appropriate. An initial hurdle when answering this question is that, despite the surge in interest for media attribution in marketing academia and practice, attribution does not have an agreed-on formal definition. Therefore, this article proposes an attribution formulation based on the relative incremental contribution that each medium makes to a purchase, taking into account advertising carryover and interaction effects. The formulation shows that attribution is proportional to the marginal effectiveness of a medium times its number of exposures. This means that often-used media will have high attribution weights. However, the profit-maximizing allocation for a fixed budget is a function of advertising effectiveness, but not a function of past exposure levels. By offering analytical derivations and studying simulated and empirical data, the paper shows how attribution can offer misleading insights on how to allocate resources across media. Moreover, the empirical example demonstrates that substantial gains in purchase probability can be made using profit-maximizing allocation compared with attribution-based allocation.

In this study, the authors examine factors that affect Web site visit duration, including user demographics, text and graphics content, type of site, presence of functionality features, advertising content, and the number of previous visits. The authors use a random effects model to determine the impact of these factors on site duration and the number of pages viewed. The proposed method accounts for three distinct sources of heterogeneity that arise from differences among people, Web sites, and visit occasions to the same Web site by the same person. The model is fit using one month of user-centric panel data, and it encompasses the 50 most popular sites in a market. The results show that, in general, older people and women visit Web sites for a longer period. Some surprising results are revealed in an examination of interactions between these demographic and site characteristic variables. For example, sites with higher levels of advertising usually result in lower visit duration, but this is not the case for older people. The model also yields insights into the relative importance of different sources of heterogeneity in visit duration; heterogeneity in visit occasions dominates over individual-level and Web site-specific heterogeneity.

The use of coupons delivered by mobile phone, so-called “m-coupons,” is growing rapidly. In this study, the authors analyze consumer response to m-coupons for a two-year trial at a large shopping mall. Approximately 8,500 people were recruited to a panel and received three text-message m-coupons whenever they “swiped” their mobile phone at the mall entrances, with downstream redemption recorded. Almost 144,000 m-coupons were delivered during the trial, representing 38 stores that supplied 134 different coupons. The authors find that an important feature of m-coupons is where and when they are delivered, with location and time of delivery significantly influencing redemption. How long the m-coupons are valid (expiry length) is also important because redemption times for m-coupons are much shorter than for traditional coupons. This finding suggests that their expiration length should be shortened to help signal time urgency. Nevertheless, traditional coupon features, such as face value, still dominate m-coupon effectiveness, as does the product type, with snack food coupons being particularly effective.