How Campaign Attribution Improves Marketing Performance

How Campaign Attribution Improves Marketing Performance

Success in marketing is measured by the number of sales it produces for every unit of resource the strategy consumes. It is easy to determine the overall ROI from your marketing efforts, but the information is not always detailed enough. It does not tell you whether your strategy is suitable or that you need to improve its performance. This post will discuss how this can be remedied using campaign attribution.

Currently, the marketing environment consists of multiple channels in various capacities. The only way to optimise marketing efforts is to know how each channel influences revenue. Since there are multiple touchpoints in the customer journey, it is only through campaign attribution that you can pinpoint which strategies directly affect conversions.

What is Campaign Attribution?

In plain language, attribution analyses every marketing strategy's contribution and evaluates each channel's performance in driving ROI. 

In digital marketing, the customer journey has become too complex that it would take up to hundreds of touchpoints before closing a sale. 

In campaign attribution, the contribution of every touchpoint can be understood and quantified. This will allow any marketer to see if there is a need to improve, retain, or eliminate specific touchpoints in the sales funnel.

Why is Campaign Attribution Important?

While it is perfectly normal to track how marketing strategies perform, only campaign attribution makes it possible to see the whole picture of your marketing performance. 

You can count the number of sales you made from a campaign, but it can be more challenging to identify which part of the campaign closed the sales.

It is best to know about the benefits of campaign attribution to see its importance:

1 – Better Marketing Evaluation

Since most marketing campaigns now consist of multiple components, it is crucial to see which directly impacts sales. Attribution lets you evaluate every touchpoint for its potency. This will allow the marketing team to focus on the better-performing areas to make the most out of them.

2 – Reduce Marketing Costs

Digital marketing is not cheap. The truth is that companies need to shell out a lot of investment money for marketing. With attribution, you can point out which strategies are helping you generate sales and which channels are not. You can reevaluate your budget to reduce the costs. This means you can conserve resources while ensuring that the campaigns left running are doing their jobs.

3 – Allows Component Level Optimisation

Although you have the option to scrap off underperforming marketing campaigns, it also means wasting the investment you placed on them. Attribution allows you to evaluate and revamp faulty components. You have better chances of turning the tables around and increasing the impact of those campaigns after overhauling them.

4 – Maximise ROI

You can already maximise the ROI by reducing costs and optimising marketing components. Another way to maximise the revenue is by giving the marketing team plenty of opportunities to innovate. Attribution gives you a ground-level understanding of your marketing endeavours. 

You can tweak it to perfection by gaining more knowledge about how each touchpoint relates to the ROI. You can develop more ideas about how to combine touchpoints or supplement each other to make better campaigns in the future.

Campaign Attribution in B2B Businesses

In b2b businesses, the sales cycles are typically long, so multiple touchpoints are involved. You can expect the b2b attribution to be a little more challenging with more marketing channels and data to collect and organise.

But data collection and organisation are just part of the initial stages in b2b marketing attribution. Because of its complex nature, there is a need for deep and thorough analysis to establish how touchpoints led customers to finalise a purchase. 

A marketing attribution software can help, but understanding the fundamentals in attribution will ultimately make campaign attribution genuinely beneficial in a b2b campaign.

And by fundamentals, it means understanding the different types of attribution models.

Types of Marketing Attribution Models

Attribution modelling is a method of assigning weight factors to the different touchpoints that a customer has to go through. It typically has two categories:

• Single-touch Attribution Models where conversion is assigned to a sole touchpoint, usually the first or the last. In a first-touch attribution, all credits of the ROI are given to the first marketing touchpoint that leads to the purchase. The last-touch attribution is the same, but all the weight of the conversion credit is placed on the final touchpoint before a sale.
• Multi-touch Attribution Models involve assigning to multiple touchpoints the credits of a sale. It is more accurate than single-touch attribution models because it gives in-depth data about where ROI comes from.

The most common types of multi-touch attribution models are the following:

1 – Linear Attribution

This attribution gives ROI credit to all touchpoints in the sales funnel. It divides the credit among all touchpoints equally. It is excellent for short sales cycles but is not ideal for longer ones since it does not accurately reflect the fundamental value of each channel.

2 – Time-decay Attribution

The time-decay model is ideal for long sales cycles and gives credit to the more recent touchpoint before a sale. This model assumes that the earlier touchpoints are not as impactful as those at the bottom of the sales funnel.

3 – U-shaped Attribution

Two touchpoints in this model matter, the first and the lead generation. Each gets 40% of the sales credit, while the remaining 20% is divided among the rest of the touchpoints.

4 – W-shaped Attribution

This model is similar to the U-shaped model, but a third touchpoint, the opportunity creation, is added as among the most critical touchpoints in the customer journey. Each of the three touchpoints is given 30% of the credit, and those between them divide the remaining 10%.

5 – Full-path Attribution

This is like the W-shaped model, but the final close is added to the mix. The first touchpoint, lead generation touchpoint, opportunity creation touchpoint, and the final close touchpoint will be credited 22.5% each. The 10% is divided among the rest of the touchpoints.

6 – Custom Attribution

A custom attribution model may be the perfect solution because it can be challenging to have the best attribution data when working with multiple marketing channels. Developing a customised model will give you the most accurate evaluation of the impact of those touchpoints you consider the most important in the customer journey.

Digital marketing churns out data in bulk. It is challenging to identify which data are significant. By using a suitable marketing attribution model, the task becomes more straightforward. You can analyse the most meaningful data more accurately. It allows you to adjust future marketing efforts to achieve business goals faster.

Starting Your Campaign Attribution Journey

While it may take a while to fully grasp the concept of attribution and the variety of attribution models, there are a couple of ways to work through it with ease:

Establish attribution objectives. It is a given that the primary purpose of attribution is to maximise ROI. Having a secondary objective or more is not bad at all. Improving your marketing performance, for example, is a good objective. These objectives will guide you in choosing what attribution model to use. It will allow you to identify which touchpoints to focus on and which campaigns correlate to ROI.

Align the objectives to attribution. Once you have your objectives, align them with your chosen attribution strategy. Choose the data you want gathered from tracking the customer journey better.

Understand the customer's journey. The best way to benefit from attribution is to understand the customer journey. Study how customers interact with the touchpoints. Are they able to get through them without any hiccups? Is there a way to shorten the journey to make the conversion cycles faster? You will see how they progress on the sales funnel when you fully understand how they behave or react to the touchpoints.

Choose a suitable attribution model. Each attribution model gives different insights into the customer journey. Analyse whether the data it gathers is significant to the goals that you want to achieve.

Retest and Repeat. There is no perfect attribution method that works for all kinds of businesses. You can make it work by retesting and repeating the process until all your objectives have been achieved.

Conclusion

Campaign attribution is about figuring out how your marketing strategies impact your ROI. It gives you the best picture of how the different channels affect your efforts. Today's marketing landscape is very competitive. There is a need to see which campaigns perform well and which do not. 

You can adequately launch digital marketing with accurate attribution for better conversions and revenues. It is the bridge that connects your hard work with sales numbers.

It will take a lot of time and skill to gain insightful marketing data, but attribution makes it much more manageable. Learning at first may be a little complex, but the payoff is substantial.

Author Bio: Jenn Pereira is a full-time marketing consultant and growth hacker who works for startups like Removal.AI, and DesignStripe. She creates custom strategies for various clients to provide organic traffic growth and streamline their revenue pipeline through effective SEO and content marketing.