Demystifying Attribution in Marketing: a bird's eye view
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
Department store owner, John Wanamaker succinctly put into words the frustration of every marketer looking for a reliable lead attribution model.
When he said this over 100 years ago, he must not have expected it to remain relevant a century later! The challenge of latching down on an accurate way to measure the effectiveness of marketing in closing a sale has been unresolved for a long time.
?Much research has gone into demystifying the buyer funnel and closely monitoring the journey from first contact to conversion, yet precise attribution still evades marketers. Let’s look at attribution and its challenges a little more closely.
Defining the metrics
One of the first issues is identifying how to define attribution. What customer action are you measuring? Are you looking at creating a prospect, a lead, or a conversion?
Broadly speaking, a visitor to your site is a prospect. Once they sign up for a demo, the prospect becomes a lead. Post the demo, the salesperson who manages to close a sale successfully effects a conversion.
Even these definitions are open to interpretation by each business.
Complex buyer journey
Most buyer journeys are not linear. A prospect might have stumbled upon your company post on their LinkedIn feed. If the subject matter is of relevance, they might hit the Like/Follow button on your LI page. Seeing a regular flow of posts from your business, they follow up a few days later to visit your website and spend some time on the home page and view the blog. With no immediate requirement, the prospect could be dormant for months together.
Sometime later when a need arises, the prospect recalls your company name based on your social media activity and returns to your site to sign up for a demo/trial or to download an asset, transitioning to become a lead.
Dark Funnel
Unbeknownst to you, the evaluation process continues. The lead may be making enquiries with friends and colleagues, asking questions in communities, and looking up reviews of your product on third-party sites. These are untraceable customer actions known as the Dark Funnel actions. These touchpoints are beyond the realm of any existing software.
Unpredictable timelines
Meanwhile, based on the shared details, your salesperson would have contacted the lead now for a conversation. In B2B decisions, closing can be a long-drawn process. These are usually big-ticket items that must match budgets, should be technologically aligned, and may need approval from a buying committee with stakeholders, who could be geographically dispersed across time zones—all of which add to the complexity of the actual deal closure. The involvement of multiple people, over a long period of time, across multiple channels together make the conversion a long process, resisting accurate identification of the numerous touchpoints that contributed to the conversion
?Attribution models
Based on the customer journey outlined above, it is evident that the conversion process is multifaceted. However, to simplify the attribution process, businesses adopt one of three broad approaches.
Based on touchpoints, these are the first touch/ interaction, the last touch/interaction, and the multiple touch approaches.
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In the first-touch model, the first recorded touchpoint is given 100% of the credit. For instance, a website visitor shares their contact details on a form. If this were to convert, success would be attributed to this touchpoint.
The second is the last touchpoint. A visitor browses the website and looks at the home and offerings pages, but the touchpoint where they sign up for a meeting that leads to a sale will be the touchpoint attributed to the conversion.
The third approach recognises that there are multiple touchpoints. Keeping this in mind, each interaction is assigned a value. For instance, a Follow on social media is 20 points, a download of an asset on the site 30 points, signing up for a demo or a meeting could be 30 points and the actual sale another 20 points. The weightage can be customised based on the business and its processes.
This approach is most popular because it takes into account the efforts of multiple stakeholders in closing a sale. As an Accenture Report revealed,? “Most B2B buyers are already 57% of the way through the buying process before the first meeting with a representative.” Thus, a multi-touch attribution process is more accurate and fair.
?The truth: there is no 100% reliable attribution model
?Let’s be honest. Lead attribution is complicated. Despite the different models available, setting the weightage for each interaction in the multiple-touch model or deciding whether the first touch or the last touch should get the credit is itself open for debate.
Moreover, while it would be a marketer's dream to be able to put their finger on the exact touch point that decided the deal closure, this insight has evaded marketers.
Of course, additional data can be collected using plugins and apps that provide more information on website visitors, yet a large part remains hidden with the exact number of interactions unknown.
Market leaders have done significant research to arrive at a definite number of touchpoints from prospect to sale. These remain inconclusive, ranging from seven and eight to a whopping 50 touchpoints! Jeb Blount in Fanatical Prospecting has defined different numbers based on the type of customer targeted—1-5 for familiar prospects, up to 12 for warm inbound leads, and between 20 and 50 for cold prospects.
Additional challenges
With the deprecation of third-party cookies, stricter data regulations, and most customers doing a lot of self-research on dark social media and in the dark funnel, it is increasingly getting tougher to capture all details and establish the number, type and frequency of touchpoints.
The way out
Lead attribution is a constantly evolving process. The only way is to collect and correlate data while finetuning the attribution process continually.
These include tracing the customer decision-making process, leveraging UTM parameters, investing in attribution software, and tools like Google Analytics, marketing automation platforms, and CRM systems also come in handy to track interactions and identify patterns in data to arrive at data-driven decisions.
At Think ABM, we create our frameworks, tracking a range of signals. We map customer journeys, use A/B testing, and track campaigns across channels. We’ve tested the implementation of multi-touch attribution models like first-touch, last-touch, linear, time-decay, and position-based to understand different touchpoints. We extract best practices and select models that are best suited while continuously iterating and tweaking the process to improve the process and build our frameworks.
To know more about attribution, connect with me at [email protected]