Before buying a product online, a customer is exposed to typical events or interactions (such as clicks, page visits, and page impressions) that are associated with different channels (such as email, social network connections, paid search advertising, organic search, direct buy, and referral). The sequence of interactions with digital marketing channels during a specified period that lead to buying the product (the conversion event) is called the conversion path.
The following figure shows a conversion path in which the user is exposed to six different marketing channels before making a purchase.
Attribution is typically used to identify the relative contributions of the different channels to the conversion event.