Purpose

The purpose of this article is to outline the attribution models used in source tracking.

Audience

This guide is intended for the Recruitment Marketing/Advertising team and Eightfold’s solution architects.

Basics

Application source tracking attribution models are the methods used to determine and attribute the source of user acquisition in the application. These models help understand which marketing channels or campaigns are driving the most valuable traffic and conversions.

Here are some commonly used application source tracking attribution models:

The job seeking journey

A job seeker typically engages with multiple sources and undergo various interactions before identifying and applying to a suitable job opportunity. Suppose a candidate had the following sources and engagement:

Job seeker went to a career fair and left their contact information → recruiter reached out the them via email and invited them to apply → job seeker searched for the company’s career site on Google → from Google they landed on the company’s PCS, found an ideal position and submitted an application

Career fair, recruiter, Google and the PCS are all sources that helped the candidate to find the job and apply. Eightfold records all sources and engagement (that Eightfold can track), and provides reports and insights on last-touch attribution as well as multi-touch attribution.

Last-touch attribution model

By default, Eightfold reports on the last source from which the application happened. Consider this example again:

Job seeker went to a career fair and left their contact information → recruiter reached out the them via email and invited them to apply → job seeker searched for the company’s career site on Google → from Google they landed on the company’s PCS, found an ideal position and submitted an application

The last source is ‘PCS (from Google)’, so in Talent Acquisition the recruiters can see that the source associated with the application is ‘PCS (from Google)’, and on the ‘Career Site and Source Analytics Dashboard’ the default source associated with this application is also ‘PCS (from Google)’.

Multi-touch attribution model

Rather than attributing the entire credit to a single touch-point, a multi-touch attribution model distributes the credit across multiple touchpoints in the customer journey.

Consider the same job seeker journey above, Career fair, recruiter, Google and the PCS are all sources of the application and they will get attribution. These attributes will be shown only in the ‘multi-touch attribution’ section on the ‘Career Site and Source Analytics Dashboard’ and not on the Talent Acquisition UI.

PCS source tracking: last-touch attribution

Besides application source tracking, Eightfold also reports on PCS source tracking for customers who have PCS. There are 2 main differences between ‘PCS source tracking’ and ‘application source tracking’:

1. PCS source tracking is essentially activity source or traffic source tracking; it reports on sources to the PCS (from where the visitors came to the PCS), regardless of whether the visitor ended up submitting an application or not. Application source tracking only reports on sources associated with an application.
2. Within PCS source tracking, only the last source is captured. Consider the following example:

   Visitor searched for ‘jobs at XYZ’ on Google search engine → clicked on a LinkedIn search result → clicked on ‘Apply on company site’ on the LinkedIn job post and got directed to XYZ’s Personal Career Site (PCS)

   The last source to PCS is LinkedIn. We are not able to capture Google because it is the source to LinkedIn, not the source to PCS.

Caveats

Application Source (source associated with each application) & Activity Source (source surfaced in career site dashboard for each visitor session) may not map 1 to 1 with each other for the following reason:

• Activity Source in the career site dashboard shows raw source values (for referrers, post-normalized values) instead of the mapped source values based on referrer_src_map. This is intentional since our dashboard allows all table data to be downloaded as CSVs. The data in these tables can then be post-processed & grouped in many different ways to suit different customer needs on source tracking.