Although marketing attribution isn’t a new concept, many B2B marketers are still missing out on vital information that could revolutionise their budget allocation and return on investment. In fact, 72% of B2B marketers don’t even know why they chose the attribution model they’re currently using; meaning they have no clear, data-driven insights into which channels are driving the most conversions and ultimately generating the highest return on investment (ROI).
Here are four examples of how your B2B business can achieve more streamlined marketing attribution.
- Multi-channel Touchpoints in Paid Credit
Drilling complex data down to a single metric is crucial for attributing how often specific campaigns and channels play a part in the customer journey. However, mistakenly allocating too much credit to one is a common problem faced by marketers. This is where paid credit comes in.
Paid credit is the sum of conversions that occur from ads and other conversion paths from a specific campaign or channel. This differs from ’assisted conversions’ as it considers the path for each individual conversion. You can find paid credit in Google Analytics under Conversions -> Multi-Channel Funnels -> Top Conversion Paths.
In the example above from Google Analytics, row five has five total touchpoints – two from paid search and four from display. If you were looking into ’assisted conversions’ display would only be credited once, and considering it takes between six and eight touchpoints on average to close a sale, this would simply over-value your campaigns and leave you in the dark regarding an individual channel’s performance.
Paid credit however, takes the number of touches from a campaign or channel and divides it by the total number of touches overall – in this instance 4/5, giving display a 0.8 paid credit.
This approach can also be used to make important decisions around marketing budget allocation and channel optimisation, because paid credit will give more value to campaigns that are higher in the sales funnel and earlier in the customer journey, without inaccurately crediting them.
- See Top and Bottom Funnel Contribution
Able to work out the paid credit and understand the entirety of your campaign performance? Great. But the next step is to break down the activities within each campaign by sales funnel stage to understand where everything is contributing.
For those who aren’t aware, a sales funnel is a marketing strategy that represents the ’stages’ a potential customer follows before becoming an official customer or client.
Particular campaigns and channels are inherently at the top of the sales funnel, so whilst they’re key for introducing new users to the brand, they won’t necessarily drive a direct response. This could
include Google Display Network and social media channels such as Facebook. Bottom of the funnel includes campaigns and channels that usually drive a direct response such as paid search.
Before you begin segmenting your campaigns, you need to understand the campaign’s path – this can also be found in Google Analytics. Then you can find the average touch count to segment your funnel. For example, an average path length of 11 would segment like so:
- Top of funnel: touches 1 to 3
- Middle of funnel: touches 4 to 7
- Bottom of funnel: touches 8 to 11
Attributing this data will form the basis of your integrated marketing strategy. Now your marketing team will know what’s working for clients throughout each stage of the sales funnel enabling them to capitalise on the good and implement strategies to optimise the bad.
- Attributing Content
The use of content marketing has surged in recent years. In fact, it’s now estimated, that in the USA, 93% of B2B marketers are using content at the heart of their marketing strategies. But how can you tell if it’s actually driving revenue? It’s probable that you’ve invested a lot of time, energy and resources into writing your content, so ensuring you’re generating a return on investment is key.
Enter attribution modelling. For content marketing, this involves understanding which white papers, blog posts, webinars and even social media content a user has engaged with before becoming a lead and eventually a customer/client. This will help you assign the correct value to each channel, ensuring you have the full picture of your content marketing’s performance and what exactly happened in-between each touchpoint.
Here are some examples of how you can evaluate the success of your content marketing based on some of the most common attribution models:
First-touch: 100% of weight is assigned to the first touch that generated a lead. This could be a lead filling out a blog form or one who downloaded an eBook.
Last-touch: 100% of the credit assigned to the touch that generated the sale. If someone subscribed to your blog newsletter, but didn’t become a customer until they watched a webinar later on, the webinar would get all the value.
Linear: Assigning equal weight to all content and touchpoints, i.e. the e-book, newsletter or webinar will all receive equal credit for the sale.
Multi-touch: Best suited for companies with three or more marketing channels, who have a longer sales cycle or budget; covers not only first-touch and last-touch but all touchpoints in-between. Content marketing is likely to be utilised throughout the customer journey, e.g. a lead subscribed to a newsletter at top of the sales funnel, submitted a content form, made a phone call, downloaded an eBook before finally becoming a customer or client.
Choosing the correct attribution model for your content marketing will entirely depend on your business’ sales cycle. Whichever method you use, knowing how the exact value of your content marketing will mean you’re not blindly writing and seeing no revenue!
- Building an Offline Attribution Model is More Important Than Ever
Although we’re living in a digitally-dominated age, this doesn’t mean for clients or customers that the tried and tested offline methods are no longer relevant. Online and offline now go hand-in-hand, but bridging the gap between the two is anything but easy.
You might have understood pure online-to-online attribution, but things get considerably trickier when offline is thrown into the mix. Considering it’s predicted that the web will influence 46% of offline sales in the USA by 2021, failing to attribute your online-to-offline sales could cause you to under-estimate the specific route taken in your client/customer’s multi-channel journey.
For example, although it’s believed that consumers prefer to contact business online (e.g. through contact forms, live chats and emails), 75% of consumers in the USA that believe a phone call is the quickest way to receive a response. Also, considering that 70% of consumers have directly called a business from a search engine results page (SERP), it’s clear that online is a key driving force for offline sales.
Call tracking, from companies such as Mediahawk, plugs the gap between digital spend and offline sales. Through visitor level call tracking, you can allocate unique, dynamic numbers to marketing campaigns to pinpoint which online ads or channels are generating offline over-the-phone sales for your business. The data collected can then be scrutinised to provide a detailed report on the ROI for each marketing channel.
In the example above, a marketing agency is using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and have created an ad for the search term ’marketing agencies in London’. However, because they have listed their phone number in their ad, any potential customers will be able to call their agency without having to click on the ad. Unfortunately, this means they have no possible way of attributing which keyword drove their offline phone calls.
However, if they integrated call tracking into AdWords, each user who visited their website via a PPC campaign would receive a unique, tracked phone number. This data can be used to attribute which keywords are driving offline sales, giving a complete overview of their performance and the opportunity to make smarter, data-backed decisions on future AdWords campaigns.
