Why Excessive Attribution Could Hamper Marketing Effectiveness?

I still remember my obsession with attribution during my early real estate marketing days.

For one particular project, we ran multiple campaigns and were determined to rigorously identify which mediums and activities were most effective.

That month, we spent heavily on BTL (Below the Line) marketing, which involved putting up temporary hoardings, distributing paper inserts, and branding vehicles in the area where our project was located.

Every day, I would ask the marketing manager, “How many calls have we received through BTL?”

He would often reply, “Very few.”

This made me question whether the campaign was really working.

But to our surprise, instead of making calls, prospects visited the project site directly after seeing those BTL advertisements.

We also noticed a slight spike in website traffic, with people making inquiries online as well.

Digging deeper, we saw an increase in organic searches for the project on Google due to the BTL campaign.

This experience shattered my excessive obsession with attribution.

Attribution is usually done for the marketer's sake, to prove that our marketing efforts are effective and to allocate marketing spends prudently.

However, last-mile attribution is rarely accurate because prospects never behave exactly as we expect them to.

They don’t care about attribution and often don’t reveal how they found out about the company unless we sit with them and understand their buying journey.

Ultimately, that’s what we did at the real estate company.

Instead of solely relying on CRM software to directly attribute leads, site visits, and sales to a particular medium, we asked a few customers how they came to know about us.

Their answers revealed that they saw our ads on multiple mediums, multiple times, on various dates.

They even read reviews on some portals.

That’s when I realized the importance of focusing marketing campaigns based on the audience’s buying behavior.

All I needed to know was who the target market was, what the ideal message could be, and the appropriate mediums to reach them.

Then, I watched for cause and effect across multiple avenues, like spikes in website traffic, direct visits, calls, referrals, and organic search traffic.

The problem most marketers face is the need to clearly show the attribution of channels to top management and finance teams for analyzing campaign ROI.

This pressure often leads them to inaccurately attribute leads, store visits, website traffic, or sales to specific mediums.

In my real estate case, the CEO was sensible and prudent, and he understood when I presented my findings to him.

Campaigns don’t work in a linear way, especially when you invest in various channels because marketers think linearly while customers think non-linearly.

For example, marketers often ask, "Which works better, online or offline?" But customers don’t differentiate between online and offline; these two merge in their world.

One solution to this is adopting a high-level attribution approach that focuses on overall marketing spend versus sales or another effective metric above the bottom of the funnel.

In real estate, for example, we could look at the cost to acquire a customer or the cost per site visit.

These are tough metrics that force marketers to act more effectively, rather than just measuring top-of-the-funnel metrics like marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

In the end, it’s not about pinpointing a single source but understanding that effective marketing often requires a holistic approach.

It’s about recognizing the complex and multi-faceted journey of our audience and adapting our strategies to meet them wherever they are.

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