Upon starting up a business and doing the marketing, one of the immediate mistakes that you can commit is tending to do everything you can for the company. You try to launch every campaign you can think of in the hopes of increasing awareness, engagement, and sales. What makes this wrong is that you also tend to forget to determine why you are doing what you are doing. You should always be guided with your goals to stay on track to success. But how do you know if you are treading on the right path?
When unsure about your marketing strategies’ effectiveness, measuring their success is the only way to know the answer. This is where sales attribution becomes a crucial factor in your marketing mix.
This post will introduce you to the salient points about marketing and sales attribution and its importance. We will also help you go around with the struggle of starting it.
What is Sales Attribution?
Simply put, marketing and sales attribution determines the value of all lead generation and sales techniques. It is a kind of analytical science that is widely used by marketing and sales teams. It is a method by which a marketer can determine if a specific campaign benefits the company. Attribution also determines how different channels contribute to the ROI.
Sales attribution can help you identify customer actions that led to buying your products. In attribution, these actions are also called touchpoints. They can be the moment that prospects click on an ad they found on their social media pages. A touchpoint can also be that time when leads research your products using Google search. A more direct touchpoint is when leads actively inquire through a phone call, an email, or live chat. The last touchpoint is when leads become customers by making a purchase.
In all touchpoint examples, there is a lot of information that you can derive from the interactions between the customers and your company. But you cannot see or measure them by only looking at the surface. Their channel preferences, for example, can only be revealed if you have a tool to count which channels they like to use. You can see essential marketing details through different metrics, like the devices customers mostly use when purchasing your products, the type of content they get engrossed with, and a lot more.
More than counting numbers, attribution allows you to analyze the metrics and use them for your marketing. When you see social media marketing, for example, is more effective at gaining attention and convincing leads about your products. Your team has to work double on improving your social media content.
Going deeper, attribution will let you appreciate the accumulated effect of your marketing efforts by showing you the causal link between your campaigns and the ROI. It helps you identify which strategies make a difference in engaging leads. It further supports you in determining how many impressions turn into clicks and the number of clicks that become purchases.
As you can see, sales attribution is a process that will help marketers make data-driven decisions for campaigns. It gives you valuable insights into your marketing strategies, understands where your ROI comes from, and analyzes crucial metrics about your marketing.
Why Is Sales Attribution Important?
Since today’s standards in marketing are highly complex, it is crucial to be armed with attribution reports when making marketing decisions. The most prominent benefit of sales attribution is that it will enable you to identify which marketing methods reached the most customers, brought more leads, and increased conversions.
Attribution makes it easier for the sales and marketing team to determine which channels give the most value to your investment. Furthermore, it allows them to focus on channels that are genuinely helping and scrap those that do not contribute much. Your organization can save time and valuable resources in the process.
Apart from giving a clear picture of the success rate of your campaign strategies, attribution also maps out the whole customers’ buying journey. It will help you understand your target audience better. Instead of making assumptions about what the customers like or need, attribution gives you data about the content they prefer and channels they want to use when interacting with your company. It also becomes helpful in evaluating the customer experience. You can see which content they respond to the most, so you try to produce the same quality of content for future campaigns. The attribution reports can help refine the process to make the experience worthwhile for each customer.
The Different Attribution Models
While it sounds easy to attribute since it only involves monitoring and analyzing marketing metrics, the process can be a little complex. The catch is that you must choose an attribution model or method that counts the channels’ contribution within the customer’s decision ladder.
There are several attribution models available, but it would be best for startups to start their attribution journey by learning about the most common ones, which are:
Single-Touch Attribution Models
This attribution model gives all credits to a single marketing source. It does not matter if the lead went through multiple channels and has seen plenty of campaigns before finally making a purchase.
Single-touch attribution can be a first-touch attribution where the credit goes to the first interaction or a touchpoint in the conversion path. An example is when a lead clicks on a newsletter sent through email. Even if the lead dismisses the email and eventually finds another campaign, perhaps on social media, and gets interested enough to buy, the newsletter will count as the source of the sales.
It can also be a last-touch attribution where instead of the first interaction, it is the last channel that receives the credit. Going back to the example, if the social media post is the latest campaign that convinced the lead to become a paying customer, it is where all attribute is given.
Multi-touch Attribution Models
Compared to the first type of attribution model, the attribution types under the multi-touch attribution models are a little bit complex. The only reason for its complexity is that it considers all touchpoints in the customer journey instead of a single source or channel. There are four most common attribution models under this category, and they are:
- Linear Attribution – The simplest model in the multi-touch attribution category, Linear Attribution credits every touchpoint equally. This means that every campaign is considered necessary for the entire customer journey. While it may appear fair to put equal weight on each touchpoint, a drawback of this model is that it will be impossible for marketers to identify the crucial touchpoints that led to sales.
- U-Shaped Attribution – If you are curious about which channel acquires the most audience and the touchpoint that drives conversion, then the U-shaped Attribution is the one you should use for your marketing. This marketing attribution identifies the first and last touch points as the most crucial moments of the customer journey. They are given 40% each, and the remaining 20% are shared across the other channels.
- W-Shaped Attribution – Aside from the first and last touchpoints, the W-Shaped Attribution model also counts the Lead generation touchpoint equally important. The three channels share 90% of the credit, and the remaining 10% is distributed to other channels.
- Time-Decay Attribution – This model gives all channels credit, but the touchpoints nearest to conversion are given higher credits. It is effective for establishing which strategies are driving conversions but will not help if you want to focus on driving brand awareness.
As if choosing from among the given attribution model example is not challenging enough, you also have a choice to customize your attribution model. With a personalized attribution, however, you have the freedom to give credits to the marketing channels that you think are playing significant roles in your conversions. It can be daunting at first, but with a custom attribution, you can use algorithms to collect and process data to calculate the different channels’ significance. The algorithms can be implemented using several tools, like Google Analytics.
How to Successfully Start With Attribution?
After learning about what attribution is, the different attribution models, and why you should have it for your organization, the next step is the actual process. The best way to do it is by having a b2b attribution software.
Attribution will be easy if you have the tools to understand all touchpoints in the sales cycle. Attribution tools also create detailed reports and analyses based on the attribution model you use for your business. As a bonus, here are some tips to help you succeed with sales attribution:
1. Test and Learn
There is no single perfect attribution model. It depends on many factors, so you must test which model best suits your marketing mix. With continuous testing, you can identify the strengths and flaws of each model. This will be useful if you are to design a customized attribution model.
2. Capture All Data
The only way to give credit where due is by having all the data to back your insights. Put in place a reliable b2b attribution software, and you will have no trouble collecting, storing, and analyzing vast amounts of data.
3. Use Metrics to Your Advantage
Most problems upon starting up a new business, you are still trying to understand your customers. Attribution tools can be integrated with other marketing tools to produce all sorts of reports, including customer data. Make use of the information that you get to profile your customers. This will help you refine your strategies to be more effective at helping you reach your goals.
4. Invest in the Best Marketing and Sales Attribution Tools
You will have quality data if you are armed with the best attribution software. Research the different software available and see if it fits your current needs.
5. Keep it Simple
It does not matter if you use single or multi-touch attribution models as long as it works for you. Do not complicate things by worrying that other attribution models might be better than the one that you are using. Stay focused, examine the attribution reports, and slowly expand to other models. Everything will come into play in an insightful manner if you thoroughly understand how it works.
Conclusion
If there is one thing that marketers need to invest in, it is marketing and sales attribution. Attribution must be considered an integral part of the marketing evaluation process. It provides reports and insights that enable you to reach your marketing goals faster and more effectively. With attribution, you do not only monitor what campaign strategies contribute to your ROI; it helps increase the ROI itself due to its many benefits to your marketing team.
If you are not using attribution for your campaigns, you risk having an inefficient strategy in your marketing mix. Your budget is also at risk since you do not have an opportunity to cut your marketing spending.
Although it can be challenging to start with sales attribution, the good news is that there are many resources to learn about it. There are also a lot of attribution software and tools that can optimize your attribution methods.
You can also ease your way in slowly by trying out simple attribution models, like the single-touch models, before moving forward to the more complex multi-touch models. This will allow you to see how different attribution models work, and you can see which one will help you accomplish your attribution goals.
Sales attribution does not bring overnight success to your business. It will take time to gather marketing data and even more time to generate reports and provide advanced analysis. But thinking about all the innovative insights and competitive advantages that marketing and sales attribution can bring makes it all worth it.
