Marketing Attribution – The Secret Weapon of Breakout Brands

Since internet-based marketing attribution became established in 1995, it has been the preserve of large companies with full-sized marketing and data analytics teams but even then it has been under-exploited. However, the times are changing.

What Is Marketing Attribution?

While Wikipedia defines (marketing) attribution as ‘…a set of user actions that contribute to the desired outcome, and the assignment of a value to each of these events…’, the reality is less clear. Like any popular business term, the meaning of ‘marketing attribution’ varies depending on which part of the business you are talking to. 

But, as we’ll come on to later, the understanding of how the desired behaviour (conversion) is achieved is actually close to useless to a business in isolation.

It’s this MIT research which highlights why. Based on a survey of 2,719 managers in organisations from around the world, it finds that the foremost barriers to creating business value from analytics are not data management or complex modelling skills. Instead, the number one barrier by far was translating analytics into business actions. In other words, it’s making business decisions based on the results, not producing the results themselves, which is the biggest problem.

How Do You Measure Marketing Attribution?

An attribution model is a set of rules that determines how much credit for a sale is assigned to each touchpoint along the customer journey. A well-designed attribution model will help you understand the revenue contribution of each individual marketing campaign, message, and tactic. Ultimately, you can use this data to optimise your marketing spend and direct more investments into the messaging, channels, and tactics that are working well. On the other hand, marketing attribution will also help you stop wasting money on tactics that are not worth the time and money you’re putting in. 

How Do You Use Attribution In Marketing?

Marketing attribution helps you understand which content is driving conversions and therefore driving revenue. This insight helps you control your marketing budget and better speak to your audiences on their terms. But, it’s a multi-headed beast in terms of the marketing process and navigating internal stakeholders. Successful implementation of multi-touch and weighted multi-touch attribution models may take the participation of IT, while finance teams will want to be involved in the goal-setting and ROI portions of the program.

The same integrated mindset goes for CRM. Multi-touch attribution programs that integrate your company’s CRM stand to gain by sending attribution data directly into the sales machine. Together, sales and marketing can rely on the same tool to track, monitor, and report on the performance and strategy of their campaigns. Without it, the data you collect remains siloed from the rest of the organisation, making it much harder to apply to future campaigns for optimization.

The sticking point here is that sales teams historically only want to hear about the inception point of the lead, and not about marketing’s influence on prospects they’re already pursuing off their own bat. It’s a continuing effort for marketing to convince sales that the biggest impact marketing can have on the business is more than just pure lead-based demand generation — it’s about strategically partnering with sales to mature and close deals faster than ever before.

Why Is Attribution Important In Marketing?

In a nutshell, the answer is of course ‘money’ or revenue. Or in business terms ‘growth’. But even though marketing attribution is the key to unlocking this growth, it’s important to remain grounded and pragmatic about the data. For example, marketing attribution was built for measuring captured demand not demand itself. Ad platform attribution models and CRMs can’t attribute conversion credit to ‘dark social’ e.g. Slacking a LinkedIn post to your boss or hearing about a product on a podcast.

However, it’s good to remember that attribution models are simplified illustrations of complex customer journeys at best. That’s why instead of trying to build a perfect attribution model, your goal should be to build a useful revenue model and test it for your business and your audience – which is unique to your business at any given time. It’s also good to understand that you don’t need to be a large organisation to complete this revenue modelling work. There’s an emerging group of vendors and agencies specialising in this work, which can mean the board-ready report can be completed in a matter of weeks.

The next stage in the evolution of attribution is likely to be a hybrid attribution model that uses two separate measurement methods to more accurately measure the impact of both demand creation and demand capture strategies. These strategies are complementary, not competitive. Giving you way more data coming directly from customers to inform your demand and business strategy.

Given the economic headwinds and saturated communication environment, as far as growing a business is concerned, marketing attribution is now simply table stakes. And it’s those marketing  teams which bite the bullet and complete the data-centric work which will be laying the foundation for success.