Understanding Marketing Attribution

Marketing attribution, at its simplest, is about connecting historical customer data: from marketing, sales and in some degree, customer succes. By connecting all the dots — where also deals close and revenue metrics are held — the marketing team no longer has to guess their revenue impact. Nor have the sales team have to guess what the quality of the leads are. Every deal can be tied back to specific marketing, sales and even customer success actions.

Without proper attribution, marketers are forced to using marketing metrics that serve as proxies for or leading indicators of revenue (visitors, leads, conversions, etc.). They can then guess that some percentage of visitors turn into leads and another percentage of leads turn into warm leads, and on and on to make a guess at how much revenue the marketing team is driving. More than just lacking precision with these estimates, not all leads are of equal quality — attracting a few high quality leads is more valuable than attracting many low quality leads.

The higher in the funnel the metrics are, the less they tell you about quality, which makes using proxy metrics for revenue not very actionable.

In the 2018 State of Pipeline Marketing Report, only 2 in 10 CMOs reported using [the right] attribution model and only 24.1% say they are using attribution to give credit where it’s due. How can a CMO drive and optimize for revenue in a meaningful way when they are not using any attribution s

Question 2

How to set journey properties in JS

Accepted Answer

You can set journy.io journey properties by a fix set of JS calls, right from within your website or application.

Here's a list of available calls at your disposal:

You can use the following script to identify a journy by email.

|| journy("identify", { email: "john.doe@domain.tld" });

You can use the following script to trigger an event by tag string.

|| journy("event", { tag: "download ebook 15" });

||| Note that all parameter are non-case-sensitive.

Question 3

Selling Attribution to the C-level

Accepted Answer

Selling Attribution to the C-level

When it comes to the C-suite, attribution gives marketers more credibility at the proverbial table. By allowing marketers to report on results, rather than just activity, you’re able to have revenue accountability and prove that marketing is in fact a revenue center, and not a cost center.

More than just proving the value of marketing, attribution data enables marketers (and, as a result, the whole company) to see if they are on track to hit their goals. It reveals which channels and campaigns are overperforming or underperforming, which allows marketers to adjust the dials, double-down on bets, and optimize in order to hit company targets.

CEO

How do you make B2B marketing attribution appeal to the CEO? By showing that attribution offers more efficient use of the budget, lowers acquisition costs, and it is the foundation for building a pipeline machine for sustainable long-term growth.

Better Budget Use: From the CEO’s perspective, marketing is often seen as a cost center — marketing spends money and just hopes that it’s working, which makes things like budget negotiation a difficult conversation. Channel efficiency metrics allow the marketing team to measure the actual amount of revenue driven from each channel, and reallocate the budget to grow faster and cheaper. It makes the relationship between the CMO and CEO that much better.

Lowering Acquisition Costs: Lowering acquisition costs (or CAC in the SaaS world) by u

Question 4

How Is Attribution Different Than Web Analytics, Marketing Automation, And Other Marketing Tools?

Accepted Answer

How Is Attribution Different Than Web Analytics, Marketing Automation, And Other Marketing Tools?

Many marketing tools, ones that most organizations already use, claim to do attribution or at least some version of it. It’s natural to want to use these tools for attribution as well since you’ve already committed to the rest of the tool. But unfortunately, when you take a closer look, they don’t really do what you need and you end up with the same problems.

Web and Other Channel-Specific Analytics

When it comes to attribution, one limitation of web analytics (e.g. Google Analytics) and other channel-specific analytics (e.g. Facebook Insights) is that it only tracks form conversions, which is still a proxy for revenue in a B2B situation. Not bad for a free or inexpensive tool, but it requires quite a bit of “hacking” to create a usable attribution solution through UTM parameters, event setting, and connecting spreadsheets full of channel-specific data in order to dig into the necessary granularity of each channel all the way through to revenue. When hacking a solution, because the attribution is decentralized (done by each marketing channel separately), marketers face the challenge of double-counting credit. For example, if a visitor clicks on an AdWords ad on Monday, a Facebook ad on Wednesday, and then buys something for $100 on Friday, both your AdWords data and your Facebook data will claim 100% conversion credit because they don’t communicate with each other. When

Question 5

How Does Attribution Fit In The Marketing Stack?

Accepted Answer

How Does Attribution Fit In The Marketing Stack?

One of the biggest challenges in choosing to adopt new marketing technology is figuring out how it will integrate into the marketing stack. Will it make existing processes easier or harder? Is the value-add greater than the time and resources it takes to onboard? These are important questions that every new tool must be vetted for. If it doesn’t fit into the workflow or play nicely with existing tools, marketers won’t use it and the value will be greatly diminished.

Attribution doesn’t replace marketing automation or the CRM, it sits between them and enhances both. At its core, marketing automation is really about scaling, while maintaining an effective level of personalization — marketers dictate the tasks and let the software run it faster than a person ever could. And the CRM on the sales side of things is about tracking and organizing leads and customers.

Attribution, on the other hand, helps determine the marketing strategy, provides feedback and insight, and helps marketers make better decisions across the entire marketing funnel. It’s the measurement data that fuels effective planning and optimization. And it allows automation tools to scale more effective campaigns and helps the sales team use the CRM more efficiently.

When you realize that marketing automation’s version of attribution doesn’t offer the sophistication required of B2B companies or connect with the CRM, you see that there’s not really any overlap. I

Question 6

Multi-Touch Attribution Modelling

Accepted Answer

Multi-Touch Attribution Modelling

Marketing attribution, especially in the B2B space where the customer journey is long, complex, and requires both the marketing and sales team to work in tandem, tells the most complete and accurate story of the customer journey. Specifically, this means understanding the importance of multi-touch attribution models, such as W-shaped, for B2B marketers.

Most marketing automation platforms handle attribution using a lead-creation touch model and most CRMs handle attribution using a last-touch (opportunity-creation) model. Lead-creation touch (what they often call first-touch) gives full marketing credit to the marketing effort that led to the first form-fill. This is tracked through web source-referral analysis plus any attached UTM parameters that lead to a session where a lead is created. However, because it gives 100% of the credit to that single touch, the lead-creation touch model overvalues the middle of the marketing funnel, and undervalues the awareness stages as well as the bottom-of-the-funnel conversion stages.

Last-touch works in a similar fashion, but gives all the credit to the marketing effort that led to the final conversion. This model overvalues the bottom-of-the-funnel and ignores the efforts that brought the lead in as an anonymous visitor and nurtured them into a sales qualified lead. The systematic over and undervaluing of specific stages in the funnel is called model bias. By having an attribution model that specifi

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