Effective attribution is the route to marketing success

Image source: Voice — http://www.voice.be/blog/?p=1138

Here’s a prob­lem with a lot of tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies: they have ter­abytes of mar­ket­ing met­rics but they’re just not under­stand­ing the true value behind the data and how to best allo­cate their mar­ket­ing dol­lars. One of the key rea­sons is their out­dated approach to mar­ket­ing attri­bu­tion (i.e. the meth­ods used to credit mar­ket­ing chan­nels like PPC, SEO, dis­play, email, etc. and the role they play in con­vert­ing cus­tomers to sale).

It’s too often the case that our clients use “last click” attri­bu­tion, whereby they give the last mar­ket­ing touch all of the credit. In addi­tion, they give all con­ver­sions the same level of value, ignor­ing the source of the sale, the pro­file of the buyer, the prod­ucts pur­chased and good old Life Time Value (LTV). All this has led to mar­keters focus­ing on the bot­tom of the fun­nel  (i.e. those activ­i­ties that are near­est to the point of sale) and ignor­ing those aware­ness activ­i­ties nearer the top of the fun­nel. In real­ity, last click attri­bu­tion effec­tively elim­i­nates attri­bu­tion at the top and deval­ues cer­tain types of mar­ket­ing activ­ity e.g. online dis­play and SEO.

So, what to do? Well, first you need to adopt an ana­lyt­ics plat­form that can lever­age and join-up tags and cookie-level infor­ma­tion to get bet­ter insight into online cam­paign per­for­mance. These plat­forms pro­vide a real pic­ture of the impor­tance of first, sec­ond and third touches and cal­cu­late their true con­tri­bu­tion to mar­ket­ing and sales con­ver­sion. And, by look­ing at the paths cus­tomers typ­i­cally take through our mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions, we’ll be able to attribute the bulk of our rev­enue to a spe­cific num­ber of well-performing mar­ket­ing channels.

To ensure you’re effec­tively imple­ment­ing mar­ket­ing attri­bu­tion, you need to estab­lish how it’s cur­rently being done within your organ­i­sa­tion. You must then decide the value of spe­cific oppor­tu­ni­ties, the dif­fer­ence between cus­tomer types, bud­get allo­ca­tion, etc. Then based on this research, you can change the way you assign value to spe­cific mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties. Finally, you’ll need to ensure that you have a plat­form that can track all of the required touch points and build an accu­rate attri­bu­tion model. Good exam­ples are Con­vertro and Mar­ket­Share.

A great attri­bu­tion model is one thing, but imple­ment­ing change within your organ­i­sa­tion is another. Form our expe­ri­ence with tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies, change can be fraught with dan­ger. There are a num­ber of per­son­nel respon­si­ble for spe­cific mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties. Some of these activ­i­ties might be based in Europe, whilst oth­ers might be man­aged glob­ally from head­quar­ters in US or Asia. It’s a dif­fi­cult polit­i­cal exer­cise to get them to accept the changes to the per­ceived value of their mar­ket­ing con­tri­bu­tion. But, by adopt­ing a more ana­lyt­i­cal approach, the proof will be there to imple­ment change and replace that out­dated last click attri­bu­tion with a more bal­anced approach.

Once you get attri­bu­tion work­ing smoothly across all of your online activ­i­ties, you’ll then be able to look at ways to encom­pass offline met­rics e.g. event atten­dance, print in the form of QR codes and out­door advertising.

IMHO — Effec­tive mar­ket­ing attri­bu­tion will mean you can recog­nise the fol­low­ing improve­ments to your marketing:

• Greater vis­i­bil­ity and effi­ciency across all of your online mar­ket­ing activities.
• Shift­ing bud­gets between mar­ket­ing chan­nels to ensure an opti­mal mix
• Give less focus on mar­ket­ing chan­nels that get the last click.
• And, give more focus to those that con­tribute at ear­lier points in the funnel
• Finally, you’ll be able to prove per­for­mance and the role mar­ket­ing plays in Rev­enue Per­for­mance Man­age­ment (RPM)