Now more than ever, marketing and sales leaders are taking a critical look at where they allocate their resources and how they staff their teams.
Attribution modeling is one of the best tools for providing clear guidance on what works and what doesn’t.
What is marketing attribution?
Marketing attribution is an approach to understanding how various marketing and sales touchpoints influence a lead’s transition from visitor to lead to customer.
By implementing referral in your organization, you will have a better idea of:
- The most influential channels during the different stages of the sales cycle.
- Which content formats have the most or least impact on your marketing or sales efforts.
- Campaigns with the most revenue and return on investment (ROI).
- The most common sequence of online or offline events that prospects interact with before becoming a customer.
Why is attribution important in marketing?
Referral data analysis provides you with an understanding of which marketing efforts, sales, and customer success contribute most effectively and efficiently to revenue generation.
Attribution models help you identify opportunities for growth and improvement, while also informing budget allocation decisions.
By using accurate attribution models, marketers could make more informed decisions about their campaigns, which allowed them to increase their return on investment and reduce budgets wasted on ineffective strategies.
What are the challenges of marketing attribution?
Developing a perfect referral model that guides all of your decisions is a dream for most marketers.
Here are five challenges that lead to inconclusive data models or project abandonment:
Channel management
This is a common challenge for institutional marketers who have web assets across multiple websites, channels, and teams.
Without proper analytics tagging and system settings configuration, your web activities may not be accurately tracked as a visitor goes from a small single campaign site to the main domain.
Or, the potential customer may not be tracked as they go from your website to get directions and then go to your physical storefront to make transactions.
Make decisions based on small sample sizes
For smaller websites, marketers using referral data may not have statistically significant datasets to draw accurate correlations for future campaigns.
This results in false assumptions and an inability to replicate past success.
No compliance tracking
If the referral forms are based on offline activities, you may require manual data import or proper registration of sales activities.
In my experience overseeing hundreds of CRM applications, there is always some level of non-compliance in logging activities (such as calls, meetings, or emails). This leads to skewed referral models.
‘Models, mo’ problems: Every analytics platform has a set of five or more attribution models that you can use to optimize your campaigns around them.
Without a clear understanding of the pros and cons of each model, the person building the attribution report may not build or configure these reports to align with your organization’s goals.
Data privacy
Since the GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy laws were enacted, analytics data still gets murkier every year.
For organizations that rely on web visitors to opt in for tracking, attribution modeling suffers due to the inability to pull tracking for each touchpoint.
How do you measure marketing attribution?
Attribution is about giving credit when it is due. There are dozens of attribution tools available to set the contribution to your digital or offline hotspot.
Attribution measurement begins with choosing the data model that aligns with your business goals.
Some attribution models favor interactions that occur earlier in the customer journey while others give the most credit toward interactions closer to the transaction.
Here is a scenario of how you measure your marketing referral in the first touch attribution model (we’ll move on to the different models next):
A potential customer comes to the website through a paid search ad and reads the blog.
Two days later, she returned to the site and saw two product pages.
Three days later, she came back through a Google Membership listing and then converted on the site by signing up for a discount coupon.
With the first touch referral model, your paid search ad will get 100% of the credit for that conversion.
As you can see, choosing the “right” model can be a contentious issue, as each model gives a percentage of credit for a specific interaction or placement along the path toward becoming a customer.
If your business relies on paid search, SEO, offline channels, and other channels, chances are one individual working on one of these channels will look like a superhero, while other marketers will look like they’re not really lifting their weight. .
Ideally, when you choose a referral tool, you will be able to generate reports that allow you to compare different referral models, so that you have a better understanding of which channels and interactions have the most impact over certain periods of time leading to a conversion or purchase.
What are the different marketing attribution models?
Marketers can use various marketing attribution models to examine the effectiveness of their campaigns.
Each attribution tool has a few templates that you can optimize and report on campaigns. Below is a description of each model:
First click referral
This form gives credit to the first channel the customer interacted with.
This model is commonly used when improving brand awareness and conversions/engagement at the top of the funnel.
Assign last click
This model gives all the credit to the last channel the customer interacts with.
This template is useful when looking to understand the most impactful channels/interactions just prior to conversion/purchase.
Last click referral is the default referral model for Google Analytics.
Multi-touch/channel assignment
This model gives credit for all the channels or touchpoints that the customer has interacted with throughout their journey.
This form is used when you are looking to give weight equally or to specific interactions.
There are variations on the multitouch model including time-decreased, linear, U-shape, W-shape, and J-shape.
as orderd
This model allows you to manually assign weight to individual channels or placements within the customer journey.
This form is best for organizations that have experience using referral models, and have clear goals for the most impactful touch points in the buyers journey.
Marketing referral tools
There are many different tools available to help marketers measure and analyze marketing referral. Some of the attribution tools are features within marketing automation platforms or CRM systems such as active campaign or HubSpot.com.
Others are standalone referral tools that rely on APIs or integrations to pull and analyze data, such as triple whale or Dreamata.
As you evaluate the tools, keep in mind how much offline or sales data you should include in your referral forms.
For systems like HubSpot, you can include sales activities (such as 1:1 sales phone calls and emails) and offline list import data (from trade shows).
Other tools, such as Google Analytics, are not natively designed to pull in this type of data and will require advanced development work to include these activities as part of your model.
(Full disclosure: I work with HubSpot’s top-rated agency SmartBug Media.)
Additionally, if you need to be able to see very specific touchpoints (such as a specific email sent or an ad clicked on), then you need a full funnel referral system that displays this level of granularity.
Referral models are a powerful tool that marketers can use to measure the success of their campaigns, optimize online/offline channels, and improve customer interactions.
However, it is important to understand the limitations of referral, the pros and cons of each model, and the challenges of critical data mining before investing significant budgets in referral technology.
More resources:
- Complete Guide to Multi-Touch B2B Referral Forms
- A practical guide to multitouch attribution
- B2B Multichannel Lead Generation: 8 Steps to Success
Featured image: Yuriy K/Shutterstock
