Marketing and sales leaders are looking at where to allocate their resources and how to staff their teams.
Attribution modeling is a great way to give clear guidance on what is working and what isn't.
What Is Marketing Attribution?
The approach to understanding how various marketing and sales touchpoints influence the prospects' move from visitor to lead, to customer is called marketing Attribution.
You will have a better idea of how your organization works.
- Which channels are most influential during different phases of the sales cycle.
- Which content formats are more or less impactful in your marketing or sales enablement efforts.
- Which campaigns drove 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?
It is possible to understand which marketing, sales, and customer success efforts are contributing the most to revenue generation.
Attribution modeling can help you find opportunities for growth and improvement.
With accurate attribution models, marketers are able to make more informed decisions about their campaigns, which has allowed them to increaseROI
What Are The Challenges Of Marketing Attribution?
It's difficult to develop a model that guides all of your decisions.
There are five challenges that results in incomplete data models.
Cross-Channel Management
This is a challenge for enterprise marketers who have a lot of websites.
As a visitor moves from one campaign micro-site to the main domain, your web activities may not be tracked accurately.
The prospect may not be tracked as they go from your website to your store to make a purchase.
Making Decisions Based On Small Sample Sizes
Attribution data may not have statistically significant data sets for smaller websites.
The inability to repeat prior success is a result of this.
Lack Of Tracking Compliance
If your models rely on offline activities, you may need to import data or log sales activity.
There is always some level of noncompliance when it comes to logging activities. The skewed models are caused by this.
Every analytic platform has a set of five or more models you can use to improve your campaigns.
Without a clear understanding of the pros and cons of each model the person building the attribution reporting may not be structuring or configuring them to align with your organizational goals
Data Privacy
Every year, the data gets murkier due to the new privacy laws.
Attribution modeling is affected by the inability to pull in tracking for every touch point for organizations that rely on web visitors to opt in.
How Do You Measure Marketing Attribution?
It is important to give credit where it is due. There are many ways to assign credit to the digital or offline experience.
The data model that matches your business goals is Attribution measurement's first step.
Some models give more credit to interactions closer to a transaction, while others give less.
There is a scenario of how to measure marketing attribution in a first-touch model.
There is a paid search ad on the website.
She returned to the site two days later and looked at a few pages.
After three days, she comes back through an organic listing from the internet search engine and then signs up for a discount coupon.
The paid search ad will get all of the credit for the conversion.
Each model gives a percentage of credit to a specific interaction or placement along the path toward becoming a customer.
One of the individuals working on one of the channels will look like a superhero, whereas the other marketers will look like they aren't pulling their weight.
If you choose an Attribution tool, you should be able to build reports that will allow you to compare various models, so you can better understand which channels and interactions are most influential during certain times of the year.
What Are Different Marketing Attribution Models?
Attribution models can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns.
There are a number of models you can use to build reports. Each model is described here.
First-Click Attribution
Credit is given to the first channel the customer interacted with.
This model can be used for brand awareness and top-of-funnel conversions.
Last-Click Attribution
All of the credit goes to the last channel that the customer interacts with.
The model can be used to understand which channels were most influential immediately before a purchase.
The last-click model is the default model for GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Multi-Touch/Channel Attribution
Credit is given to all of the channels that the customer interacted with during their journey.
The model is used when you want to give weight to certain people.
Variations of the multi-touch model include time-decay, linear, U-shaped, W-shaped, and J-shaped.
Customized
The model allows you to set the weight manually.
The model is best for organizations that have experience in using the model and have clear goals for what they want to accomplish.
Marketing Attribution Tools
There are a number of tools that can be used to measure and analyze marketing data. Attribution tools can be found in marketing automation platforms.
Others are stand-alone tools that rely on integrations to pull in and analyze data.
Consider the amount of offline or sales data you need to include in your models.
Sales activities like phone calls and 1:1 sales emails can be included in the system.
Advanced development work is required to include these activities as part of your model because other tools are not built to pull in that kind of data.
I work with the highest rated partner agency.
If you need to be able to see the very specific touchpoints like a specific email sent or an ad clicked, then you need a full-funnel Attribution system.
Attribution modeling is a tool that marketers can use to measure the success of their campaigns.
To understand the limitations, pros and cons of each model, and the challenges with getting conclusive data, is important.
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The image is from Yuriy K.
