May 3, 2019 By:

Digital marketing is all about data and analytics. If you have the right strategy but not the correct data, all your efforts will be in vain and here comes Marketing Attribution.

The market has reached a point, where practically nothing is possible without being present virtually and digitally. But the point is, only digital presence is not enough. You need to evaluate the right pain points and structuralize the data to be successful.

What exactly is attribution?

When we talk about this word in terms of marketing, it means choosing the right metrics. Millions of dollars are spent on marketing. What is the main aim of marketing?

The only major goal of marketing is to make the people aware of your product or services, convince them to buy it and convert them into your customers. But how do you calculate what ROI (return on investment) you are getting on your every penny spent.

This is the main part. Without actually understanding the customer’s behavior and what action is influencing their decision, all hard work is useless. You need to understand which tactic is motivating your viewer to convert into a customer.

Spending on marketing ads, media and campaigns are not sufficient. You need to spend the right amount at the right time and in the right direction. Here is where marketing attribution steps in.

Why marketing attribution is important?

It is basically a method used by marketers to measure the investment made on marketing and media strategies. Taking into consideration the analytics and data, attribution helps in targeting the marketing budget in the right direction.

If you do not know which channel or mode is actually driving the traffic or conversion, all your investment is going down the drain. Because if you do not know the medium of conversion you cannot make the right decision to form your budget accordingly.

To make things easier and a little more practical, marketers use attribution to calculate and strategize budget allocation. The two common approaches used to estimate the impact of marketing are:

 

  • Marketing mix modeling (MMM)
  • Multi-Touch attribution (MTA)

 

Obviously, before implementing any strategy, marketers do an inside out count as to what will work for them and what not. Also, every step and strategy is calculative and based on how much ROI it will give.

But still, many marketers are not clear about how attribution is the right thing for their planning. There are several tools available to measure the ROI and choosing the right can be a little tricky sometimes.

How attribution is useful for marketers?

The level of detail in a set of data is different for both marketing and advertising methods. Therefore it is first important to understand what you are exactly looking for. To tackle this, there are multiple attribution approaches.

Whether you need to calculate and understand the attribution measurement of the previous day or the previous month there are different attribution approaches.

In the digital era we are living in, there are several platforms through which a customer first analyses your product or service and then decide whether to buy it or not. To understand this customer behavior you need the right attribution model.

The best way to avoid drowning into the clickthrough rates (CTRs), shares, approaches, likes, etc. is to practice metrics mapping through attribution modeling.

The biggest challenge faced by marketers is measuring these metrics. If you do not know which platform is channelizing the traffic you cannot decide on the marketing strategy budget allocation.

To overcome this situation, you can follow two simple steps:

  1. First is, keeping in mind all the media touch points of your viewer, you need to understand your customer’s purchase path. Also, keep in mind that you need to know everything about the customer’s path, be it organic, paid, earned or owned.
  2. The second thing after understanding that path is to allocate budget accordingly for the final ROI for all, be it a sale, profit or lead.

How to get attribution success?

You can boast about your attribution success, only when you have facts and figures to prove your strategy. When you have the data to show that the investment made on marketing is showing results, only then you can wear the tag of attribution and show off.

The best advice to achieve this is to start with small and set your goals/expectation.

Keep your expectations real. Do not wish to be a millionaire overnight. The following points will help a little more:

  1. Understand the purchase journey of the customer
  2. Keep an eye on the missing touch points
  3. There is something more than Google analytics. Go for it.
  4. Understand which touch points are important and which one can be avoided
  5. Data-driven attribution model should be used

These things seem easy and achievable on the front, but attribution measurement is not a novice act. The very first thing, understanding the customer’s purchase journey can be a lengthy process.

For example, if a consumer saw an ad on the TV and did an online purchase of that product, then the credit will be given to online purchase and not the offline touch point.

In order to overcome this problem, you need to take into consideration all, online, offline and missing touch points.

Now pops the question –

What is data-driven attribution?

Now again comes in the concept of touch points. Let us take an example:

A person saw an ad on the television but made the purchase online, which touch point will get the credit? The offline TV which influenced the customer to buy the product or the online purchase that ultimately made the conversion?

In such cases, the final credit is given to the last ad that a customer has clicked before making the purchase. That means in the above case the credit will be given to the online touch point.

But don’t you think this is unfair and also not the correct way of calculating that which channel is ultimately making the conversion?

But data-driven attribution does not work like this. It gives credits based on the entire purchase journey of a customer. Right from the beginning, what influenced the customer to where and how he made the final decision, data-driven attribution takes everything into account.

It derives data from the account and then calculates, that which channel (campaign, ad, keyword) contributed to the final conversion.

But another challenge that you might need to face is, passing the eligibility of data-driven attribution.

There are some fixed milestones you need to achieve to get the data-driven attribution option. To make this attribution model available, you need to get:

  • Minimum 15,000 clicks on Google search
  • Conversion action must have a minimum of 600 conversations in 30 days.

As soon as you clear this criterion, you will see the data-driven attribution model option.

Now, let us take a look at:

What you should be doing about attribution in 2019?

Like all other technological advances with voice optimization and video optimization, attribution is also rapidly gaining pace. Here are some points which the marketers should follow in 2019 regarding attribution.

  • Connect your marketing strategies directly to the revenue outcome – You need to keep a check on all the channel, touch point, campaign, programme, etc that are upgrading or degrading the revenue outcome. This also means analyzing the details of the entire purchase journey of your customer.

 

  • Multi-Touch attribution technology – This is where this model will prove to be a boon for the marketers. Compared to other marketing technologies, MTA analyses the contribution to the revenue from the very beginning to the end of a customer’s purchase journey.

 

  • Monitoring the performance of AD vendors – Marketing trends are changing. The new wave is less about the likes and shares about a specific ad platform and more about the contribution it is giving to the revenue.

 

  • Adopt a marketing attribution system – This will help solve the problem of being under the burden of data chaos, scalability, cost, etc. This will allow marketers to focus on more important things.

 

With every passing year, new technologies and methods are stepping into the market. All of them with the same goal of increasing the ROI. Every businessman and marketer is looking for a secret that will give him double the amount he spent.

And this approach can be the right for grabbing success because if you do not aim for more, you will not get more. The only objective of digital marketing and its growing pace is growing conversion and maximize the return on investment.

There are several marketing attribution models, each one profitable likewise. You need to understand the concept and decide which one suits you the best. If you do not keep up with the pace of the changing trends, be ready to be left back.

 

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