The path to purchase and attribution modeling: Introduction to special section

Firms make significant marketing investments in online, mobile and offline media and channels such as search engines, social media, e-mail, display advertising, print, TV, etc., to draw in customers to their websites, mobile apps, and stores to effect conversions and spur sales. As customers go through a series of touch points across media, channels and devices on their paths to purchase, attributing the appropriate credit for each touch point has emerged as an important problem. By focusing on estimating the incremental value of a touch point and spillover effects across channels, attribution models can provide insights for allocating marketing investments across channels and targeting customers across channels and devices. In this paper, we provide a survey of the state-of-the-art in attribution modeling and analytics. As part of the survey, we also introduce the articles in this special section and position them in our classification framework. Finally, we propose a research agenda to guide future work in the area.