Marketing Attribution & Its Role In Growth - Review

Businesses have a lot of marketing data but are not getting enough value from it.

This is when specialists in attribution step in to educate and inform businesses on the value they are missing out.

What data do these businesses have?

How they can use this data to better understand their consumer behaviour?

How they can use data insights to drive value for their organizations moving forward?

The Attribution module, part of the CXL Growth Marketing mini degree, is here to guide both individuals and business on data they should have, how they get value from the data, what attribution is, how to communicate and use attribution to get business value. The key areas that explored throughout this course allow participants to:

• Identify the nuances of attribution across different marketing channels.
• Know the pros and cons of different attribution model types and how businesses use them
• Gain an understanding of all the possible data sources that are required and can be used to do attribution.
• Understand your customers in the context of how you run your business.
• Know which data questions to ask, whether internally or with vendors.

One might say ''All that might sound great, but who is the expert teaching me after all?''

Russell McAthy

Russell is a marketing data guy – having consulted or worked with some of the worlds largest brands he now is building the future of marketing tech whilst continuing his passions to change the way data is used my organisations all over the globe. Having run in-house, agencies, consultancies and his own tech businesses Russell has experience from working with startups to global enterprises.

Russell uses real-world offline examples to illustrate how attribution is tied between the offline and online experience. Both B2B and B2C examples and tacts are presented in this course.

What is Attribution exactly?

Attribution is more than just a buzzword – it needs to become the way you do business, understand performance, manage campaigns and workloads. Attribution in short is understanding consumers so that we make smarter decisions.

Attribution is a discipline. Econsultancy reported in 2018 that less than one-third of businesses are using a defined attribution business model and that 43% of companies claim “measuring ROI” as a top marketing challenge. Attribution’s challenges go beyond digital.

Is this course for me?

This course is perfect for you if you fall under one of the following:

• You have no attribution strategy
• You are looking to make more informed business decisions
• You want to align attribution to your business goals for better ROI

To get a better overview and make a better decision if this course is right for you.

I share with you here a sneak peek of the modules included within the bigger Attribution module of the CXL Growth Marketing mini degree.

What is marketing attribution?

• Attribution is the context of the why and how
• Understanding the consumer 
• Performance of consumer activities 

Attribution in the marketplace

• Visual IQ
• Google Attribution 
• Using attribution to track return on investment 

Attribution – Not just Online

• Marketing is not only online 
• ROPO - Research Online Purchase Offline

How to use Attribution

Attribution is not just another number on a report and it’s not analytics. Attribution shouldn’t be a part of your marketing, it should be the way you do marketing - the start, middle and end. I’m going to give some tactical examples of how attribution can be used and then how you can change a business strategically using outputs from attribution.

• Tactical or Strategic 

Do you need Attribution?

• How many times do you engage with people?
• How frequently?
• Do you have enough data?

Attribution Models

• Last Non-Direct Click Model

• Last Interaction

• Linear  Interaction

Distribute the value equally

• Time Decay

• Static Model 

Give the last interaction fixed percentage and then the previous interactions will get fixed percentages based on the number of interactions that are there. So it could be that you give the last interaction 60% of the value and then the next interaction back 30% and the next interaction back seven and the next interaction back three.

• Variable Model 

Takes into account the time between each interaction when distributing value.

• Custom Attribution Model

Machine Learning Model - The New Model

The Future is Algorithmic

What factors we should be including to this algorithm?

• Devices
• Seasonality 

What Data is needed

Here we’ll cover all the possible data sources that are required and can be used to do attribution from analytics through to external marketing platforms.

• Web Analytics
• What granularity of data do you need and want?

Tactics – CRO

We’ll show how attribution can be used in the conversion rate optimization process to move away from the logic behind optimization for a single interaction.

Tactics – PPC

We’ll highlight some of the opportunities within pay per click to use attribution data to understand how PPC can impact the full consumer journey, not just the last interaction.

• Generic PPC - Not ready to buy
• Brand PPC - Ready to buy

Tactics – SEO

SEO often plays second fiddle to the more easily attributable channels such as PPC and affiliates. In this section I’ll show you what impact SEO has on consumers in their decision making and how it drives performance through the whole customer journey.

• Understanding the context of what they are looking for
• Use Search Console 
• Terminology against mood 
• SEO is undervalued by 16%

Tactics – Display

Display typically is forced to use a different form of attribution that other marketing channels. When you’re buying and impression it’s exactly that - an impression. It’s not a click, for instance, which is what we would normally build our attribution around. Here I’ll show you can use the value of an impression to understand the influence display has on all marketing activity.

• Impressions after users?
• See impressions on a user level
• Campaign information - Campaign A or B?
• When the user saw this impression?
• Impressions that did not drive a visit or a conversion yet.

Tactics – Affiliates

Here we’ll break down the types of affiliates and how they affect the customer journey quite differently. The difference a cashback / voucher affiliate versus a content or edu affiliate has a huge impact on their attributed performance.

• Content Affiliates
• Influencers
• Voucher - Cashback

Tactics – Email

Understanding the value of not just the email click, but the email open without a click. This concept has a huge impact on returning customers who’ve previously converted. Here attribution is important to determine LTV of a customer.

• Pixel on emails to see if they open emails
• Monitor Clicks on emails
• Campaign parameters

What combination of email campaigns is working best?

When in the journey this email had or didn't have an impact.

Tactics – TV

Find out how to attribute TV ads to changes in your analytics

Tactics – Direct mail

Attribution isn’t just for digital channels - when sending direct mail (brochures, flyers in boxes, etc) you can track down to an individual level the impact that just receiving the mail has.

• Use a customer ID
• Programmatic direct mail - send them the products they interacted with via mail.

Strategic Application – Customer Journey Analysis

Attribution gives a better understanding of the customer by looking at the relationship between marketing and impact. Here I’m going to explain what journey analysis is, what you can get out of it and what you can change to positively impact marketing performance.

Strategic application – Value of Brand

• Brand propensity: Is the person likely to buy from your brand or a competitor? 
• Brand awareness: Brand awareness is typically used where the customer already knows that brand exists.
• Product awareness: Does the consumer know that you, brand, actually have this product or service as an offering?
• Product propensity: What is the propensity, as in, the likelihood that someone will buy that product?

Strategic Application – Life Time Value

The value of a consumer today and what their potential value is in the future, so we can decide how much we want to spend and invest to go after customers who look like the ones we're seeing today.

• Likelihood of that person buying again?
• When they are likely to buy again?
• How much they buy from you?
• How much they spend per transaction?

Strategic Application – Customer Data – Individuals

One of the ways that attribution data can be collated is at an individual level. Here we’ll go through the different options available, PII, what data can be held and at what granularity.

Strategic Application – Value of Visitor

When a user engages with a brand the power is understanding the value of that person, at the time of their visit. We will show you how this can be used in CRO, personalization and bid optimization.

• Propensity scoring 
• Lead Scoring