B2B digital marketing strategies are ever more intricate, with cross-channel and multi-channel campaigns, web content and blog posts, paid searches, display ads, organic search, and more contributing to your customer’s decision-making process.
In an ideal world, marketers would know that each and every touchpoint is optimised to provide value for the lead at that point in their customer journey – and each touchpoint would provide a lineal progression on the final path to that ultimate goal: a sale. However, showing exactly what makes customers purchase from your business can be tricky.
This is precisely why marketing attribution models are so important: they allow marketers to find out which touchpoints customers interact with before they make a purchase. Once you know which touchpoints and which marketing channels lead to a sale, you can optimise these points for higher lead generation, lead conversion rates and more sales – and you can begin to calculate your marketing ROI.
In other words: marketing attribution can help you find out what which marketing efforts are working working for you so that you can do more of it.
Lead attribution models assign credit to different points in the customer journey, enabling marketers to see which touchpoints work and to optimise those points to drive higher conversion rates. They work much like a set of rules that assign credit to the different points in your customer journey.
It’s important to find out which model fits your business best. In fact, while most companies use marketing attribution models, only 22% of companies feel that their organisation is using the right marketing attribution model!
That’s because each model has a different way of assigning credit for lead conversion. The model you choose can influence your results to show you what seems to work best, so make sure you have time to review and understand these models – both at the time of implementation and in periodic reviews after the have been in use for some time.
The two main types are single-touch attribution models and multi-touch attribution models.
The problem, however, is that single-touch (first or last touch) models give credit to the acquisition source or the opportunity source (respectively) – and a lot can happen in between those two points!
Multi-touch models allow marketers to gain more granular attribution data from each touchpoint. They represent a shift away from legacy attribution (which measured all data through campaigns and thus required clean CRM data, form fill outs, list uploads, and use of hidden fields), allowing for more granular, comprehensive, and adaptable insights and reporting.
The benefits of using these models include:
Some examples of multi-touch attribution models include:
Marketing automation platforms allow marketers to make more data-driven decisions by providing them the tools to visualise and optimise their marketing channels.
Use your marketing automation platforms to: