Analysing my business purchases

I was listening to a podcast episode about attribution and it got me thinking about the business purchases I’ve made in the last year or so, and specifically:

• Why did I buy?
• How would my purchases have been attributed?

Here’s how it breaks down:

Here's the data in pie chart format:

Thoughts and observations:

Organic search: important, but easily over-credited

75% of the purchases that would have been attributed to organic search were actually due to other reasons.

If I want to visit a website, I don't tend to write out www.companyname.com in the address bar. Instead, I'll search 'company name' on Google and then click on a link to the website. Where I already know the product I want to buy, I'll almost always arrive on the company's website via organic search, and while I used search to get there, I won't have actually been 'searching'.

This being said, close to 1 in 5 of my purchases were genuinely due to organic search (ie, where I didn't know who I would buy from before searching, and selected a vendor from a set of search results).

Organic search was the 3rd most likely reason for me to buy something, and arguably the number 1 'marketing sourced' reason (the only reasons that beat it were recommendations, me using a product before, and other people mentioning a product in my LinkedIn feed).

The two most likely reasons why I bought things are the hardest to track

I was most likely to buy based on recommendations and people mentioning a company / product in my LinkedIn feed.

Without asking me, the companies I bought from would have no way of knowing this was why I'd bought from them - and none of the companies I bought from asked me why I bought from them, at any stage in the buying process, as far as I can remember.

My buying behaviour doesn't fit into a simple category

Even taking one person’s buying behaviour over a fairly short period of time, the reasons that I bought were varied.

It would be difficult to categorise me as having a particular type of buying behaviour, and I’d suspect that this would be the case for the vast majority of people.

For example:

• Recommendations from people I knew were important (they were the 4th most likely reason for me to buy) but they only drove just over 1 in 10 of my purchases
• No single reason for buying took more than a 25% share
• While word of mouth (either recommendations, people talking about a product on LinkedIn, or press coverage) drove the largest portion of demand, a significant chunk of my purchases (close to 1 in 4) were ‘from cold’ and found completely independently – ie from searching for a type of product or service on Google, or from a Twitter ad

B2B buying decisions are like an iceberg

When I was gathering the data for this article, I listed out the things I'd bought, asked myself 'why did I buy that?', and then wrote down the most salient individual reason that came to my mind.

For 6 out of the 17 purchases, it was difficult to choose between two or more reasons that felt equally influential.

For example:

Softphone 2

I bought Softphone 2 because someone recommended it. But the full story was:

• Someone recommended Softphone 2 to me
• It had a particular feature that my incumbent (Softphone 1) didn't have
• I was planning for some time to try out Softphone 2, or another softphone that had the specific feature I was interested in, but I hadn't taken action because of busyness and it not feeling like a major priority
• An SDR from Softphone 2 reached out to me, and it was this outreach that jolted me out of my inertia
• I then had a demo, free trial, and bought it a couple of months later

In this case, I feel it's fair to attribute the purchase to the recommendation, rather than the SDR outreach, because I probably wouldn't have responded to the outreach without the recommendation. But then again, I might not have taken action without the outreach, or I might have been contacted by another softphone vendor that had the feature I was interested in and bought from them instead.

In this case, a recommendation created the demand, and the SDR outreach captured it.

Website builder

I bought my website builder (Squarespace) because I'd bought my website domain from Google - after I'd bought my domain, Google suggested a selection of website builder partners to choose from:

But why did I choose Squarespace over Wix, or one of the other options?

Over the last 10 years, Squarespace have advertised on a couple of podcasts that I'm a big fan of. So when I saw the selection of website builder partners, I immediately picked Squarespace because:

• I knew who they were and what they did
• I felt positive about them because I knew that they had supported content I'd enjoyed over a long period of time, and their adverts were quite interesting

Without this podcast advertising, I don't think I would have been familiar with Squarespace, and as a result I don't think I'd have been any more likely to choose them vs any of Google's other website builder partners.

Squarespace didn't ask me why I bought from them, or how I'd heard about them, so their years of podcast advertising went uncredited. (Squarespace have also, as far as I can tell, stopped advertising on the podcasts I listen to.)

Business bank

I chose my business bank via a Twitter ad. But the full story is more complicated:

• I first tried to set up a business bank account with Traditional Bank 1 because they were partners with the company formation agent that I used.
• Traditional Bank 1's account creation process was slow and complicated: I needed to call them up on the phone, they said there'd be a 6 week wait, and they also needed to send a letter to my home address to prove that I lived where I said I lived.
• The letter from Traditional Bank 1 didn't arrive when they said it would (and still hasn't), and so I gave up and tried to set up an account with Traditional Bank 2.
• Traditional Bank 2 is the bank I use for my personal current account, so I knew the brand and thought there might be some simplicity gains from using the same bank for business.
• I tried to set up a business bank account with them, but again, a Byzantine application process meant I gave up halfway through
• Neobank 1 target their ads at people who visit Traditional Bank 1 and Traditional Bank 2's business bank webpages, and so I was served one of their ads on Twitter
• I clicked on the ad and about 15 minutes later, I'd successfully set up an account with Neobank 1

It's probably fair to say that the reason I bought from Neobank 1 was just as much down to the traditional banks' poor buying experience as it was to Neobank 1's Twitter ad.

It's worth acknowledging that I had heard of Neobank 1 before seeing the Twitter ad due to press coverage, and I knew that they were headquartered in the UK, and these factors also played a role in my decision.

Automation software 1

I bought Automation software 1 because I searched for the product category on Google and their website came up.

However, the story of how I got to that point is much more complex:

• It began with me noticing that I was regularly needing to do a couple of slow and repetitive processes, and I had a vague sense that there might be tools out there that would mean I could automate them
• I then didn't do anything because it wasn't an urgent priority
• An SDR from an automation software company then reached out to me, and their product seemed to be close to what I was looking for
• Because of busyness, I didn't actually respond to the SDR, but I bookmarked the company's website
• A few weeks later I wanted to take action, and I went directly to the company's website and booked a demo. (I intended on crediting the SDR as the reason why I'd ended up wanting a demo, but I don't remember there being a field on the demo request form asking me how I'd heard of the company, and I don't think I was asked on the demo either - and I think I forgot to mention it - so the SDR went uncredited, unfortunately.)
• I then had a trial with this automation software company, and while the product was good, it wasn't a perfect match with what I needed
• At this point, because of the demo, I knew which terms I needed to search on Google to find alternatives
• I then searched on Google and ended up buying Automation Software 1, who provided exactly what I wanted

I think it's unlikely that I would have found Automation Software 1 without the SDR outreach from the other company making me aware of the overall category. So in this case, the demand was created by another company's SDR outreach, and captured by Google search.

Outbound acts as an inertia breaker

I didn't credit outbound as being the main reason I bought anything, but twice it served to jolt me into action, and without it I probably wouldn't have made two purchases.

Interestingly, it served to both capture demand (Softphone 2) and create demand (Automation Software 1 - although in this case I ended up buying from another company).

Implications

The main points I've taken from this exercise are:

The value of self reported attribution / asking your customers why they've bought from you

There's a famous quote from David Ogilvy that says: “Consumers don’t think how they feel. They don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.”

So while asking your customers why they bought from you is not necessarily going to lead to perfectly accurate data, it's probably going to be far better than relying upon digital attribution.

Embrace the diversity and complexity of buying behaviour

My buying behaviour surprised me because I thought it would fall into a clearer pattern or category.

If even within one person's buying behaviour there's so much complexity, the behaviour of your entire ICP is going to be infinitely diverse.

Perhaps a useful question B2B marketers can ask is: how can we profitably cater to as broad a variety of buying styles, moods and preferences as possible.

Further reading and caveats

I've been listening to a lot of Chris Walker's podcast Revenue Vitals recently, which was what got me thinking about this topic. While I don't see the world of B2B in exactly the same way as Chris, I think he has very clear and compelling ideas about marketing and sales and its direction of travel - so I'd highly recommend checking out his podcast / broader work.

Caveats:

• The reasons I’ve bought things will have been significantly shaped by the fact I've largely been buying products and services that only need to be used by me. Outbound, for example, is likely to play a greater role where larger businesses are buying things because the deal sizes are bigger.
• There were 3 purchases where I couldn't clearly remember why I'd made them so I left them out of the analysis.
• This article is clearly anecdotal, so should be taken with a pinch of salt!