all you need to know

Marketing and sales leaders are more focused than ever on where to allocate resources and how to staff their teams.

Attribution modeling is one of the best tools for demonstrating clearly what is working and what is not.

What is marketing attribution?

Marketing attribution is an approach to understanding how different marketing and sales touchpoints influence the movement of prospects from visitors to leads to customers.

By implementing attributes in your organization, you can better understand:

• Which channels are most influential at different stages of the sales cycle.
• Which content formats have more or less impact in your marketing and promotional efforts?
• Which campaigns generated the most revenue and return on investment (ROI)?
• The most common sequence of events, online or offline, that a prospect interacts with before becoming a customer.

Why Attribution Matters in Marketing

Analyzing your attribution data can help you understand which marketing, sales, and customer success efforts are most effective and efficient at generating revenue.

Attribution modeling helps identify opportunities for growth and improvement, and also helps determine budget allocation.

Accurate attribution models enable marketers to make more informed decisions about their campaigns, increasing ROI and reducing wasted budget due to ineffective strategies. Now

What are the marketing attribution challenges?

Developing the perfect attribution model to guide all your decisions is a pipe dream for most marketers.

Here are five challenges that lead to the abandonment of a definitive data model or an entire project.

Cross-channel management

This is a common challenge for enterprise marketers with web assets across multiple websites, channels, and teams.

Without proper analytics tagging and configuration of system settings, web activity may not be accurately tracked as visitors move from one campaign microsite to the main domain.

Or, a prospect may get directions from a website, travel to a brick-and-mortar store to make a transaction, and may not be tracked.

Decision making based on small sample sizes

For small traffic websites, marketers using attribution data may not have a statistically significant data set to draw accurate correlations for future campaigns. I have.

This leads to false assumptions and makes it impossible to repeat previous successes.

Lack of tracking compliance

If your attribution model relies on offline activity, you’ll need to manually import the data or properly record sales activity.

From my experience overseeing hundreds of CRM implementations, there is always some level of violation in recorded activity (calls, meetings, emails, etc.). This leads to a biased attribution model.

Models and problems: Each analytics platform has a set of 5 or more attribution models that you can use to optimize your campaigns.

Without a clear understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each model, those responsible for creating attribution reports may not be structuring or structuring them to meet organizational goals.

data privacy

Analytics data has become more vague every year since GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy laws were enacted.

For organizations that rely on their web visitors to opt-in to tracking, attribution modeling becomes difficult because not all touchpoints are tracked.

How do you measure marketing attribution?

A measure of attribution is, by definition, giving credit. There are many attribution tools that give credit to digital or offline touchpoints.

Attribution measurement begins with choosing a data model that aligns with your business goals.

Certain attribution models prioritize interactions early in the customer journey, while others give the most credit to interactions closer to the transaction.

Here’s a scenario of how to measure marketing attribution with a first-touch attribution model (I’ll cover another model next).

A prospect comes to your website from a paid search ad and reads your blog.

Two days later she returned to the site and viewed some product pages.

Three days later, she returned to her organic listing on Google, signed up for a discount coupon, and converted on her site.

In the first-touch attribution model, paid search ads get 100% of the conversion credit.

As you can see, choosing the “right” model can be a controversial issue. This is because each model gives a percentage of credit to specific interactions or placements along the path to becoming a customer.

If your business relies on paid search, SEO, offline, and other channels, one of the individuals working on one of those channels may look like a superhero, while others may. of marketers see them underperforming. .

Ideally, when choosing an attribution tool, create a report that allows you to compare different attribution models for conversions or purchases.

What are the different marketing attribution models?

Marketers can use different marketing attribution models to explore the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Each attribution tool has several models that allow you to optimize your campaigns and create reports. A description of each model follows.

First click attribution

This model gives credit to the channel with which the customer first interacted.

This model is commonly used when optimizing brand awareness and funnel conversion/engagement.

Last click attribution

In this model, all credit is given to the channel the customer last interacted with.

This model is useful when trying to understand which channels/interactions were most influential just before a conversion/purchase.

Last click attribution is the default attribution model in Google Analytics.

multitouch/channel attributes

This model gives credit to every channel or touchpoint a customer interacts with throughout their journey.

This model is used when you want even weighting or when you want to emphasize a particular interaction.

There are variations of multi-touch models such as time decay, linear, U-shaped, W-shaped and J-shaped.

customized

This model allows you to manually set the weight of individual channels or placements within the customer journey.

This model is ideal for organizations that have experience using attribution modeling and have clear goals about the most influential touchpoints in the buyer journey.

marketing attribution tools

There are a variety of tools available to help marketers measure and analyze marketing attribution. Some attribution tools are features within marketing automation platforms or CRM systems such as Active Campaign or HubSpot.

Others, like Triple Whale and Dreamdata, are standalone attribution tools that rely on APIs or integrations to ingest and analyze data.

When evaluating tools, consider how much offline or sales data should be included in your attribution model.

Systems like HubSpot can include sales activity (such as phone calls and 1:1 sales emails) and offline list import data (from trade shows).

Other tools such as Google Analytics are not natively built to ingest such data, so including these activities as part of the model requires advanced development work.

(Full disclosure: I work with HubSpot’s top-rated partner agency, SmartBug Media.)

Additionally, if you need to be able to see very specific touchpoints (such as specific emails sent or ads clicked), you need a full-funnel attribution system that exhibits this level of granularity. .

Attribution modeling is a powerful tool that marketers can use to measure campaign success, optimize online/offline channels, and improve customer interactions.

However, before investing big budgets in attribution technology, it’s important to understand the limitations of attribution, the strengths and weaknesses of each model, and the challenges in extracting definitive data.

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Featured Image: Yuriy K/Shutterstock