Marketing attribution is a business practice that allows your marketing and sales team to see if your marketing team has reached their goals. This type of report can help your team understand whether their efforts are being received by the correct target audience and if it’s making a positive impact on the company.
In 2017, Think with Google has already estimated that 76% of marketers will be competent in using marketing attribution. Since then, it’s clear that this number has only increased due to the innovative and targeted marketing strategies that professionals utilize today.
In this article, we help you understand the basics of marketing attribution, its importance, and how it can help you grow your business. Are you ready to learn? Let’s dive in.
Table of Contents:
- What is marketing attribution?
- Why is marketing attribution important?
- How can marketing attribution help my business?
- Are there any challenges to using marketing attribution for my business?
- What are marketing attribution models?
- How do I choose an attribution model for my business?
- How do I choose the right marketing attribution tool for success?
What is marketing attribution?
Marketing attribution is the analysis of a customer’s touch points with your company. This is used to evaluate if your marketing efforts are leading your consumers to fulfill your company’s goals.
Reports generated from this analysis can help direct marketing and sales departments understand which channels, strategies, and methods are working positively for their audience. It also helps your company sharpen its marketing practices for maximum effectiveness.
Why is marketing attribution important?
The importance of marketing attribution lies in its ability to inform companies about their marketing campaign’s performance. This allows marketing teams to focus on these channels and create content that’s aligned with the top-performing collaterals.
By having historical data available about your marketing campaign’s performance, your company can have a better bottom line due to the efficient use of its resources. However, this cannot be possible without the right analytics platform that can collect, analyze, and generate reports of your data.
The data your software records is what your marketing team will interpret for high-quality insights about your marketing performance, it will also enable your team to create highly relevant materials for better CLV (Customer Lifetime Value).
For example, let’s say that your customers are seeing emails and social media ads from your company on their devices. Your emails are doing great, but you notice that the bulk of your conversions are coming from your paid ads. Your team will then optimize their marketing efforts by increasing the paid ad budgets to double down on the performance of this channel.
How can marketing attribution help my business?
So far, we’ve discussed what marketing attribution is and what makes it important. By now, you may be wondering what other benefits this practice can bring to your company and why you should invest in it.
Listed below are some of the advantages your business can gain when correctly using marketing attribution.
Better bottom line
When you have an effective marketing attribution practice, you can rest easy knowing that your marketing budget is going far. You’re sure to reach your target audience on the right channel with an impactful message that’ll have them reaching for the checkout button. This can lead to more conversions for your business and thus, increased revenue.
Data-driven marketing decisions
With marketing attribution, your team will have a clear picture of your customer’s purchasing journey and they can use this data to ramp up your campaign’s performance. Your team can divert resources from low-performing channels to higher ones.
Using your marketing attribution tools correctly can also help you segment your customers and personalize your efforts for optimal results.
Intuitive product development
Finally, marketing attribution tools can help know the needs of your customers better. The information generated from this tool can help you pinpoint the items they’re likely to get. From this knowledge, you can develop or improve the products that customers engage with more.
Are there any challenges to using marketing attribution for my business?
Now that you know how marketing attribution can help you reach your goals, it’s important that you also understand this tool’s limitations.
If you don’t have the right marketing attribution software for your business and if you didn’t choose the correct model, you can end up with inaccurate information that can negatively impact your company’s performance. This can lead to a waste of financial resources and time.
For example, if you used the wrong marketing attribution model for your email marketing campaign, you may not be extracting the correct data, which can hurt your company’s performance.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, we should first define what marketing attribution models are to help you know why choosing the right one is critical to your company’s success.
What are marketing attribution models?
There are numerous marketing attribution models available that can help you grow your business. The model you choose will allow you to understand your customer’s behavior toward your company and the way the data is recorded.
There are two attribution models: single source and multi-touch. The single source models only record one customer touchpoint whereas the multi-touch model records every touchpoint they have with your business.
There are numerous models available for marketing attribution, and each of these can give your company insight into how to adjust for a more precise marketing effort that’s impactful towards your target consumer.
Here are the marketing attribution models available:
First-touch attribution
The first-touch attribution will record your client’s first encounter with your brand. This could be the first time they saw your post on their feed, visited your website, or interacted with your content.
This model’s results are simple to understand, and it focuses on the top part of your sales funnel, awareness.
Let’s say that your customer’s first touchpoint with your business is through an organic search on Google. Then, only that touchpoint will be recorded.
Last-touch attribution
The last-touch attribution model will record the customer’s last touchpoint with your company before they purchased a product or availed of a service. This model will not allow you to track any previous interactions with your company, it will only track the lone engagement that led to the sale.
This model’s results are simple to understand, and it focuses on the lowest part of your sales funnel, conversion.
An example would be if your customer has interacted with your company on Facebook, Instagram, and Email. However, when they purchased from your brand, they clicked on an ad you had on Instagram. So, Instagram will get the credit for generating this sale.
Lead-conversion touch attribution
Lead-conversion touch attribution model will record all the client’s interactions with your company before the conversion. This type of model can help your team understand which content led to conversion.
This model’s results can help your team determine which channels have the highest engagement and it can allow your team to zero in on these channels.
Linear attribution
The linear attribution model records all the channels that have impacted your customer’s lifecycle with your business. In this model, you’ll get a clear picture of your customer’s interactions with your business. However, you won’t get a precise analysis of your client engagements.
This model’s results give equal credit to each of your channels and marketing materials.
For example, your customer interacted with your email, website, Instagram, and Facebook before making a purchase through Facebook. This attribution type will give equal credit to all the channels they’ve interacted with.
Time decay attribution
The time decay attribution considers the clients’ most recent interactions with your company. This model provides critical information about the type of content and message that drives a customer to purchase from your business.
This model is best used for longer sales cycles such as finance, real estate, and business-to-business transactions.
An example would be if your client had interacted with you through channels such as email, website, Instagram, and personally. If the first interaction was through Instagram, and the latest interaction was through email, then email would get the highest amount of credit.
Position-based attribution
The position-based attribution or the U-shaped attribution records information differently. It has a criterion of how to grade certain interactions with your business. The problem with this type of grading is that it can give credit to certain interactions that are not as impactful as others.
This is the point-based attribution criteria:
- 40% to the interaction before the sale
- 40% to the first touchpoint with your business
- 20% to other touchpoints.
This model is best for companies who want to see their clients’ overall purchasing journey.
Custom attribution
The custom attribution model is the most precise model among all the models we’ve mentioned. This model allows marketers to set their criteria in the grading of each touchpoint. However, it will require a marketing professional who knows how to use these tools in order to set an effective criterion.
How do I choose the right marketing attribution tool for success?
We’ve talked a lot about marketing attribution models and why they’re so important for your company’s growth. Data is power and we believe that for you to get accurate results, you’ll need a reliable marketing platform that can accurately record your company’s information.
You’ll want to have software that can handle the scale of your business and provide you with high-quality insights for top-notch marketing optimization. If you’re looking for a marketing attribution that can do all of this, you can check out Vibetrace.
Vibetrace has helped hundreds of businesses automate their marketing workflow through automation. This has led dozens of companies to grow swiftly and sustainably.
Reach out to us today for a FREE trial of our platform!
Author bio
Bernard San Juan | LinkedIn
Bernard San Juan III is the Managing Partner of Truelogic who comes from a successful career in online companies, where he played a critical role in building & managing workforce groups. He has redesigned the organization’s IT infrastructure to improve order processing and logistics. His skills include managing performance, managing costs and training. He also manages overall sales, customer satisfaction, graphic design, copywriting, and training with first line supervisors.
