Marketers Need to Stop Obsessing over Revenue Attribution

I believe that the one job of Marketing is to drive revenue.

We certainly don’t reduce costs. If anything, Marketing is often seen as the “set-stacks-of-cash-on-fire” department by Finance. So as far as the bottom line impact goes, revenue is all we’ve got to work with.

And if that is true, then all the things we as marketers do, have to tie back to driving revenue.

That demand generation campaign you ran last quarter is certainly about driving revenue. But that press release you sent out, and that blog post you published must also connect to revenue in one way or another.

The challenge, of course, is that many marketing activities don’t translate into leads directly, are much harder (if not impossible) to track, and therefore don’t get much recognition on your multi-touch attribution charts. Although some influence of these activities on revenue does get captured, most of the impact tends to stay invisible.

If you ask any marketing attribution technology vendor, they’re likely to tell you that, with their best-in-class super-revolutionary software, you will surely connect all the dots and — magically! — know the true returns on your every investment.

However — back here on Earth — there aren’t that many companies that have the amounts (not to mention the quality) of data needed to draw statistically significant correlations between their latest brand-building campaign and revenue impact.

So naturally, the assumption we as marketers have to make is that these kinds of activities pay off in some intangible yet meaningful way. We might not be able to measure them as well as the good old Pay Per Click, but they are worth it. They have to be, right?...

That last sentence is the hard part. It’s the doubt. It’s the uncertainty. It’s the leap of faith we as marketers need to take when deciding to do the unmeasurable. And it is the leap of faith that many marketers are becoming less and less comfortable taking.

For example, take one marketing leader I know who’d cut all brand-related spend and has focused solely on demand generation, because “you can’t prove the ROI of brand marketing!” Or the many other marketers who’re not willing to publish ungated ebooks because “you can’t do accurate attribution for all the anonymous traffic!” Or all the naysayers who still question the value of social media.

And hey, I get it, the pressure from the Top to prove the ROI for every single dollar you spend can force all of us to make some tough choices about budget allocation. After all, you don’t want to be that executive who’s bringing the average tenure of CMOs down, do you?

But as Kathleen Schaub of IDC elegantly puts it, “Marketing is not a candy machine.” As gratifying as it is to see a direct cause and effect relationship between what we do and the revenue impact we make, not everything in marketing works that way.

Reconsider

If you find yourself focusing more on how to measure ROI than on how you can create great customer experiences, I urge you to reconsider. If the reality of your environment today has created incentives for this kind of approach, I urge you to fight it.

And if the pressure stems from the Top, feel free to “accidentally” get the people responsible to read this post, as I am happy to take the blame for telling them bluntly: 

Marketers drive the most revenue when they doesn’t obsess over attribution.

It’s like being in a state of flow and then thinking about it to the point where you fall out of it. When marketers become obsessed with being able to measure and attribute every last little tactic and activity, they limit their options, create sub-par experiences for their customers, and discard great ideas because of their lack of khm… “attributability.”

Instead, do this:

1. Measure and attribute what you can.
2. Build strong, logical arguments about the value of everything else.
3. Validate your assumptions through qualitative and anecdotal insights.

But most importantly: Take the leap of faith that if some things are harder to measure, it doesn’t mean they aren’t worth doing.

// I published this post on Medium too.