B2B Attribution Delivers Incremental Revenue
In just the past few years, attribution has evolved from a 'nice-to-have' feature to yet another required tool in a marketer's toolbox. When online marketing was in its infancy in the mid-90's, attributing revenue was easy. If a marketer drove online revenue, their channels were limited to their website and maybe a Hotmail newsletter or some banner ads. Times changed; one could argue for the better or worse. Methods and channels have adapted to a new online environment. These changes brought with them new ways to drive incremental revenue, but at the same time they have complicated how we measure (i.e. attribute) revenue sources. In the short span of 25 years, we marketers now face a litany of new channels: paid search advertising, retargeted display advertising, email marketing platforms, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, and social media (among many others). As a result, we now have to divvy up the slices that of the whole pie of digital marketing. Relate that with the fact that offline activities often compete for attribution from the exact same marketing dollars, and you begin to uncover the complexity with which attribution is based upon.
What About GA?
Google Analytics (GA) has long been hailed as the gold standard for many marketers craving data and information about their websites' channels. In many ways, GA has done just that: placed easily digestible data and the resulting information in the hands of marketers for future campaign decision-making. The dark side of GA is that it is obviously owned, maintained, and provided by Google aka Alphabet Inc. That same company also obviously owns the ubiquitous Google AdWords (now part of the relatively recently rebranded Google Ads). While I in no way would ever accuse Google of any impropriety, it does not seem prudent to allow the same company who provides your analytics/data to also deliver your ads vis-a-vis your advertising spend. In other words, the fox is guarding the henhouse. While Google is good at a lot of things, including being straightforward/honest in all of their dealings, they are still a U.S. corporation whose primary purpose is to make money. Juxtaposing this with the reality that B2B attribution is well behind that of B2C ecom attribution and there's an obvious opportunity in the marketplace.
Attribution Doesn't Have To Be Broken Anymore
Well, at least it's on its way to being more accurate than it has been in years past. B2C attribution is a clustered mess of analyses that tell you everything from last-click social ads to multi-touch algorithmic data points. If I added up all the revenue from all platforms' reported attributable revenue, the total revenue of all my campaigns ever run would be 500% of actual revenue. It's ridiculous when you really think about it. I actually had a marketing platform vendor managing multiple channels (paid search, display retargeting, & affiliate) who tried to take credit for the same transactions multiple times.
As B2B marketing continues to follow the lead of its forward-thinking, more progressive B2C marketing cousin, it's obvious that many of the best practices are carrying over. For years, I took part in (and sometimes led) the evolution of B2C marketing. I saw a spate of really smart people deliver great ideas: Data-driven UI/UX, multi-channel funnels, and A/B testing are just a few of them. All that being said, attribution has always been one of the most complex digital marketing specializations. With B2B digital marketing catching up, I see the potential for the B2B attribution model to follow the tried-and-true ways of the B2C ecom attribution model.
Problems on the Home-front
The most notable impediment to most B2B marketing (when it comes to attribution) is converting offline activities over to online attributes. This is particularly true when dealing with salespeople, who may or may not be okay with tracking their activities. This issue illustrates how important the marketing-to-sales relationship develops and how it impacts the ability of marketing to effectively do its job. If there is a strong buy-in from sales, with sales trust being the paramount indicator, getting your sales team to track its offline activities will be relatively easy. As a result, your first task in the long road to delivering accurate attribution is ironically the most offline of activities: internal relationship building with the sales team.
How Do I Implement This?
If you have a robust data source of offline activities being continuously and accurately entered into your CRM, you still need to figure out a way to tie signed contracts to online marketing activities. While at first this next task seems like a mountain, it might be more like a molehill. Basically, this is where your analytics platform comes into play. By continuously tracking online behavior, you can connect the dots between your B2B contacts' offline behavior (signed contracts) and their online behavior (google searches, website visits, social media interactions, and email opens/clicks).
The DIY Attribution Method
To get started with this, you'll need a web developer with intermediate-level knowledge of coding in (and/or pulling data from) your CRM. For example, if your CRM is Salesforce (SFDC), then your dev should be able to code in Apex and they'll need to understand how to write API calls for SFDC. If you can do this yourself, all the better, though my experience has been that coders are not analysts and vice versa. As a result, if you're not a dev, go find yourself a good one. If you are a dev, go find yourself an analyst to write up the specs & conclusions. Next, your dev will need to become familiar with your analytics platforms. Let say, hypothetically, that you use Google Analytics (like 99% of all the analytics-platformed sites on the web). In that case, your dev will either need to know (or need to become familiar with) the intricacies of sending data calls to GA. Once you and your dev are on the same page, you can begin implementation of perhaps the coolest code ever to hit the web!
How-To Guide Using GA For B2B Attribution
From here, basically, you'll need to collect your targeted prospective customers' online clicks/views via GA, associate them each with their own unique GA identifier (ID), and pass that data through to SFDC. Next, you'll need to determine an action within SFDC that will trigger a pass-through to GA. For most B2B marketers, this will be a change in a SFDC opportunity stage. For example, let's say your sales team has an opportunity called "ACME Airplanes 2019 Widget Composite Development & Engineering" valued at $5.2m with a current stage of "qualifying" and it changes to "signed". This stage change will trigger the SFDC data to pass-through to GA. Since you've already associated the online clicks/views of the contacts with that specific opportunity, the source / medium will then propagate across the GA Multi-Channel Funnels (MFC). With an existing off-page utm tagging system/nomenclature, you can now provide your executives, clients, and other stakeholders with solid B2B attribution data. Taking this revelation a step further, you can now accurately calculate the return-on-investment (ROI) on virtually every marketing campaign, ebook, webpage, webinar, ad, and/or social post that can be conceived. This, in effect, will give you the ammunition to call the shots and make the most informed recommendations to those who are empowered to make the most important decisions within your organization. That, my friends, is real business acumen and it is no small feat to pull off. If you can do it, you will be on the bleeding edge of B2B marketing and attribution.
What Else Can Marketers Do?
All of this being said, there are platforms out there that can help in delivering the same type of aforementioned B2B attribution without the need for all that intricate coding. With the relatively recent acquisition of Bizible by Marketo, a dawning of B2B attribution has sprung. This, combined with Marketo's own acquisition by Adobe, brings with it a realization in the B2B digital marketing community that accurate, easy-to-implement attribution platforms will soon be seamlessly integrated with our favorite CRMs, Email Service Providers (ESPs), and marketing automation tools. Even the least experienced digital marketers can implement Bizible in concert with their existing CRM and marketing automation platform. There is some customization required and there are several intricate, custom channel settings that must be fine-tuned. However, with the guided hand of an experienced B2B attribution marketing guru, your company too can deliver beautiful SFDC reports for your C-Suite.
This is Why Some Marketers Got Mad About GA
Conversely, it was this missed attribution opportunity where GA became increasingly outdated in its approach to delivering the right kind of decision-making information. Oftentimes, the customized GA reports that ensured optimal marketing-channel-performance were impossible to create or fell woefully short. For those reasons, it was utterly unsurprising that back in 2017 Google and SFDC announced a partnership to deliver more seamless data (and more integrated reporting). Throughout 2018, both companies released press that detailed some advances in their seamless integration to empower marketers and decision makers. But, in true GA fashion, the released information was both confusing and difficult to interpret. Can I easily pull GA data into SFDC with simple, easy-to-use data integrators? Will I need a high-priced consultant and/or world-class dev team to fully deliver on the requisite reports? It was (and still is) difficult to tell from the information provided by both companies. However, as aforementioned, there are existing solutions that do this...and do it quite well. So far, Bizible has delivered what I believe is a very good solution for the B2B attribution issue. Their 'report types' are already baked into SFDC and provide a good start on the journey to full B2B attribution. It is because of this that I believe the trifecta of Bizible/Marketo/Adobe is on the right track; they deliver complex, yet bite-size nuggets that you can show to nearly any executive.