What Is Marketing Attribution

Measuring Marketing Campaign Performance

Marketing attribution modeling allows you to give credit to the marketing channels and touchpoints throughout the buyer's journey that made a lead convert.

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Why You Need To Monitor Marketing Attribution

Marketing attribution is essential for several reasons, as it provides critical insights into the effectiveness of marketing efforts and helps optimize strategies for better results. Here are the key reasons why marketing attribution is important:

Understanding Channel Effectiveness

Marketing attribution helps marketers identify which channels and campaigns are driving the most leads, sales, and conversions. This understanding allows businesses to allocate their marketing budget more effectively, ensuring that resources are invested in the most impactful channels.

Optimizing Marketing Strategies

By analyzing the customer journey and the touchpoints that lead to conversions, marketing attribution enables marketers to refine their strategies. This can involve enhancing successful campaigns, discontinuing ineffective ones, and tailoring content to better meet customer needs.

Improving ROI and CLV

Attribution connects marketing efforts to return on investment (ROI) and customer lifetime value (CLV). This connection is crucial for making a business case for new initiatives and strategic changes, as it demonstrates the financial impact of marketing activities.

Enhancing Decision-Making

Attribution provides data-driven insights that support better decision-making. Marketers can use this information to justify marketing expenditures, plan future campaigns, and respond to customer behavior trends more effectively.

Aligning Marketing and Sales

Marketing attribution helps align marketing and sales teams by providing a clear picture of how marketing efforts contribute to sales outcomes. This alignment can improve collaboration and ensure that both teams are working towards common goals.

Reducing Waste & Unnecessary Costs

Without attribution, marketers may waste resources on ineffective channels and campaigns. Attribution helps identify underperforming areas, allowing businesses to stop wasting money and focus on what works.

Communicating With Stakeholders

Attribution reports make it easier to communicate the impact of marketing efforts to other departments and stakeholders. These reports provide clear, actionable data that can support marketing goals and foster better relationships within the organization.

Now that you know why it's important to do marketing attribution, two important things you need to understand first are what are the different key types of interactions and attribution models that will give you the data needed to make informed business decisions.

Key Interaction Types in Marketing Attribution

Understanding the various types of interactions that contribute to marketing attribution is essential for accurately tracking and analyzing customer behavior. Here are some of the key interaction types:

Ad Click

A contact engages with an advertisement on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Google. To make this work, you need to connect your advertising to your CRM to track this information.

Attended Marketing Event

A contact participates in a marketing event, such as a webinar, trade show, or other types of events. Zoom Webinars connect the best with most popular CRMs and allow you to pass data on both people who registered as well as attended your live events.

Call Connected

A contact has a phone call with someone from your organization. To make this work, the call must be logged to the contact's account to receive credit from the attribution model.

CTA Click

A contact clicks on a Call-to-Action (CTA) embedded on your website or included in your marketing emails. Most CRMs give you the ability to create special links but if yours doesn't, you can always use Bitly.

Form Submission

A contact submits a form on your website. Ideally, with all forms on your website, you'll want to set them up to capture any UTM variables present in the URL so that you can not only track what forms people submit but also how they found that form in the first place.

Marketing Email Click

A contact clicks a link in a marketing email delivered to them. To make this work, the marketing email must be sent to the contact's primary email address for the click to be attributed. Clicks from emails sent to secondary email addresses will not be attributed.

Page View

A contact views a page on your website or an external page with your CRM tracking code. This includes landing pages, blog posts, website pages, and knowledge base articles.

Social Post Click

A contact clicks on a social media post. To make this work, your social media accounts must be connected to your CRM to track this information. HootSuite connects well with the most popular CRMs if you want to engage and monitor your social media performance.

By accurately tracking these interaction types, you can gain valuable insights into your marketing efforts and optimize your strategies for better performance.

Interaction Positions in Marketing Attribution

Interaction positions are crucial markers that identify the interactions closest to key events in a conversion path. An interaction type can have multiple interaction positions if they are the closest interactions to multiple key events.

Example Scenario

Consider a contact with multiple interactions such as lead creation, form submission, and page view. If the form submission is the closest interaction before the lead was created, it will be marked with the interaction positions of "Last Interaction" and "Lead Create."

Contact Create Attribution Reports

For contact create attribution reports, the interaction positions are:

• First Interaction: The contact's initial interaction recorded, typically their first visit to your website
• Last Interaction: The contact's final interaction before being converted to a contact
• Lead Create: The interaction when the lead was created

Deal Create & Revenue Attribution Reports

For deal creation and revenue attribution reports, the interaction positions are:

• First Interaction: The contact's initial interaction recorded, usually their first visit to your website
• Lead Create: The contact's final interaction before being converted to a contact
• Deal Create: The contact's last interaction before a deal was associated with them
• Deal Closed-Won: The contact's final interaction before the deal associated with them moved to a closed-won stage

Ads Attribution Reports

For ads attribution reports, the key interaction position is:

• Last Touch Ad: The last ad that was interacted with before a conversion occurred

By understanding and analyzing these interaction positions, marketers can gain deeper insights into the customer journey and optimize their strategies for better conversion rates.

Types Of Marketing Attribution Models

Attribution models distribute credit to interactions along the customer's journey. Here's an overview of the most popular models available and guidance on choosing the right one for your needs:

Linear Model Attribution

This model gives equal credit to each interaction in the conversion path and is best for creating a holistic view of all marketing channels' performance assigning credit to all assets in the customer journey. The drawback of this model is that it doesn't identify which campaigns or assets are more effective.

First Interaction Model Attribution

This model gives 100% credit to the first interaction and is best for understanding brand discovery, generating leads, brand awareness, and businesses with high deal volume with a wide sales pipeline.

Last Interaction Model Attribution

This model gives 100% credit to the last interaction and is best for identifying valuable bottom-funnel actions, businesses with many leads but low deal closure, and optimizing qualified lead conversion. The drawback of this model is that it doesn't identify effective mid-funnel assets.

U-Shaped Model Attribution

This model gives 40% to first and lead conversion interactions, 20% spread across others, and is best for generating qualified top-funnel prospects, and building a lead audience for future nurturing. The drawback of this model is that it isn't ideal for mid or bottom-funnel marketing.

W-Shaped Model Attribution

This model gives 30% each to first interaction, contact creation, and deal creation; 10% spread across others and is best for fast-moving pipelines, businesses with few customer conversion methods but multiple lead-generation channels. The drawback to this model is that it doesn't measure bottom-funnel interactions.

Time Decay Model Attribution

This model gives more credit to recent interactions (7-day half-life) and is best for longer sales cycles and eCommerce with seasonal campaigns.

Full Path Model Attribution

This model gives 22.5% each to first interaction, lead creation, deal creation, and last interaction; 10% spread across others and is best for businesses focused on full-funnel customer journeys and organizations with strong marketing and sales alignment.

J-Shaped Model Attribution

This model gives 20% to the first interaction, 60% to conversion, and 20% spread across others and is best for emphasizing both first touch and conversion, with more weight on conversion.

Inverse J-Shaped Model Attribution

This model gives 60% to the first interaction, 20% to conversion, and 20% spread across others and is best for emphasizing both first touch and conversion, with more weight on the first interaction.

Choose the model that best aligns with your business goals and sales process to gain the most relevant insights from your attribution reporting.

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