What Is Marketing Attribution?

You may have heard your marketing team or agency refer to marketing attribution. Do you know what that means? It’s OK if you don’t! Many business owners don’t truly understand what marketing attribution is, or what it means in terms of their business.

‍

So let’s take a look at what marketing attribution is and why it’s important for your business:

A Brief Overview of Marketing Attribution

Marketing attribution can give you good insight into how your marketing is working in terms of sales and conversions. It helps you identify what user action contributed to a conversion (like a sale or a form completion or a lead, depending on what are tracking).

‍

It lets you know whether an organic social media post, a blog, a paid search ad, or organic traffic led to a sale, and it tells you how much money that sale brought in.

‍

Marketing attribution can help you make decisions on where to optimize marketing spend across all of your channels, where to focus for future campaigns, or where you might need a little additional help for more success.

Why Is Marketing Attribution Important?

Understanding marketing attribution can lead to improved marketing efforts in the future. It can improve your overall efficiency and revenue by allowing you to focus on the channels that bring in the highest number of conversions.

‍

When you use marketing attribution modeling, it shows you when, where, and how your customers are interacting with your brand online and in marketing materials. This can let you know, for example, that someone clicked on a paid search ad, opened an email, and then converted after clicking on a social media post on your Facebook page.

‍

There are different attribution models, so ensuring you are using the right one for your business can help you track conversions in the best way possible. This will make your marketing more efficient and more successful with future campaigns.

‍

Some of the benefits of properly using marketing attribution include:

• Optimized spend on your marketing campaigns.
• Increased ROI
• Improved product development or customer service.
• Optimized creative elements in your marketing campaigns.

3 Steps to Grow Your Business With Marketing Attribution

Marketing attribution should be easy, but sometimes it can seem complicated and overwhelming. Put simply, though, it’s just identifying which touchpoints a customer had with your company before they decided to buy your product or service.

‍

Here are three steps you can take to use attribution in growing your business.‍

1. Decide on a marketing attribution model.

‍A marketing attribution model is just the rules that you or your marketing team use to assign credit to each campaign or channel.

‍

There are several different marketing attribution models that marketers use, each with their pros and cons:

First touch attribution

This model gives all the credit, or attribution, to the touch point (organic search, social media, an ad, etc.) that led that person to your website for the very first time, whether or not they make a purchase or complete another identified conversion.

Last touch attribution‍

This model, the complete opposite of first touch attribution, assigns all the credit to the last interaction a customer had with your marketing, whether that was an email or something on social media. (This is often the default people use with marketing attribution because it’s an easy setup, however, it ignores much of the buyer’s journey.)

Lead conversion touch attribution

This one gives all the credit to whatever touch point ended up generating that lead or contact for your business.

Multi-touch attribution

This model, also called linear attribution, gives credit to all the different touchpoints equally. For example, if someone had four touchpoints, each one gets 25% credit. It gives a better view of the customer journey overall and allows you to see everywhere a customer has interacted with you.

‍

There are often other multi-touch attribution methods that may place different weights on the different touch points (like weighted attribution or a custom attribution method).

‍

When you choose an attribution model, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Your customer journey and the general purchase timeline (do you have a longer or shorter journey?)
• Your campaign objectives for the current phase of your business.
• Actionable items you might want to take from the marketing attribution model.

2. Generate campaign reports on your marketing attribution.

‍After you know what attribution method works best for your particular customer base and buyer’s journey, you or your marketing team will be able to begin to run reports on your different marketing campaigns. Sometimes, a marketing team will already have a software or process in place to help with marketing attribution.

‍

Other times, you may need to decide if you are ready to invest. Talk to your marketing team about this if you are unsure.

3. Reassess marketing strategy and budget to align with attribution goals and results.

‍After you have reviewed a few marketing attribution reports, you may be able to take a deeper look at your current strategy and see areas for improvement.

‍

Likewise, you may see very successful areas, like paid advertising, where you may decide to increase your budget for the next quarter or campaign to generate even more results and grow your business.

‍

If you are ready to grow your business with marketing attribution, but you don’t know where to start, using a team for fully managed digital services is a great way to begin!

How to Report on Marketing Attribution

Now that you’ve learned what marketing attribution is and how it can help you to grow your business, you need to understand how to report on marketing attribution.

‍

For the most part, if you have a marketing team or agency you work with, they will help with the reporting to ensure you have the information you need to make business decisions.‍

‍

If you are just getting started and want to handle it yourself, though, there are a few key things to know:

Using Attribution Reports

Once you’ve selected the attribution model you want to use, you can start putting it to use! And it’s okay if it needs to change in the future, or you decide a different model might work better after a few reports have been run. Sometimes, marketing is all about being flexible!

‍

When you are ready to begin using the reports, there are a few key ways to make sure they help your business grow and thrive:

See which marketing channels generate the most leads‍

This shows you where you can spend more time and money. If social media brings in a lot of leads, then you may want to spend more on creating good-quality social content.

Find out which pieces of content bring in the most leads‍

If a certain blog post or video is having huge success in conversions, then that is a piece of content you can share more of or repurpose to create similar content for the future or other platforms

Learn which pages on your website are viewed before someone becomes a customer‍

If your pricing page is what gets the most hits that lead to a conversion, then you will know what pages to promote and optimize.

‍

You may have heard recently that privacy concerns related to GDPR or the new Apple iOS 14.5 update have impacted attribution. Marketers and social media companies were prepared to understand the potential impact this may have had, and for the most part, there is very little impact.

‍

‍The most you may see is a slight delay in attribution reporting, but when done properly, you shouldn’t miss any of the key benefits from marketing attribution due to these new privacy updates.‍

‍

Now that you understand what marketing attribution is, and how to use it, you can create stronger marketing campaigns and put your money where the results are.

‍

If you’re ready to take your marketing to the next level, elk's Managed Digital Services can help get you there. By combining content, technology, and marketing, we can create a powerful force for growth and help you successfully attribute each conversion to a campaign. Have questions?

‍

Contact us to learn more about how we can grow your business.