For as long as marketing has existed, measuring its influence and value has been a crucial element of running a successful business. But for the modern business, whose customer journey spans across multiple channels and whose digital campaigns are tied up with hard-to-measure brand efforts, measuring marketing attribution is more complex than ever. Traditional methods, such as last click attribution, no longer give a clear picture of what’s generating results – and what isn’t.
To ensure your marketing efforts are valued right, a new approach is needed. It’s about developing attribution models that capture the details of your digital campaigns as well as the long-term effects of your branding efforts.
But precise measurement takes more than just technology – it takes close collaboration between finance and marketing and a common understanding of how to assess your results and use them strategically.
We’ll be taking a closer look at how you can optimise your attribution models and ensure alignment between your marketing and finance teams, and how you can use advanced tools like Media Mix Modelling (MMM) to measure the effect of your efforts across channels.
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Key takeaways:
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Optimise your marketing with precise channel attribution
You might be tempted to think that attribution isn’t important as long as your marketing efforts generate interest and conversions. But if you don’t know exactly which channels drive your results, you’ll lose out on valuable insights – insights that can help you understand exactly what’s working and what isn’t.
In the end, you risk pouring resources into channels that aren’t delivering while missing out on opportunities to invest in the players that’ll make a real difference.
And who wants to leave their champions benched?
Here’s a hypothetical: You’re running a campaign combining Facebook ads, email marketing and a product demo. If your Facebook ads take all the credit for your conversions, even though your emails and demo played a central part, too, you’ll get a distorted image of what’s actually working.
With a precise attribution model, you’ll be able to see how all your channels work together and adjust your investments to boost future campaigns.
To summarise, correct attribution is important for:
- Optimising your budget: When you know which channels are the most effective, you can redistribute resources to the efforts that give you the highest return on investment (ROI).
- Understanding the customer journey: Mapping how your customers interact with your brand across channels helps you create more targeted content at the right time.
- Documenting the value of your marketing efforts: Without clear attribution, it’s difficult to show management and finance how your marketing efforts are contributing to the company’s overall success.
How to map the customer journey – even the tricky parts
Now that we’ve established that marketing channel attribution is important, we’ve an important question to address:
How do you do it?
Let’s be real: we know mapping and measuring every aspect of your customer journey is no mean feat. But we promise you, it’s worth the effort.
If you manage it, it’s almost like reading your customer’s thoughts and seeing their emotional responses and movements firsthand. It may sound like magic, but there are ways to achieve something close to this kind of telepathy.
- Integrate data from all channels: Start by collecting data from every touchpoint of your business – your social media, website, emails etc. The amount of data to consider might seem overwhelming, so it’s important to remind yourself that each piece of information represents a piece of the puzzle that is the customer journey. They tell a story that you can use to identify patterns you never knew existed and gain insights to change your business strategy.
- Use unique tracking methods for offline activities: For events or print ads, you can use QR codes, trackable promo codes or dedicated URLs to link offline actions to online data.
- Prioritise a holistic approach: Make sure your attribution model maps the entire customer journey. This could mean going from simple models – e.g. last click attribution – to more advanced models that can help you identify the value of every touchpoint, from the first point of contact to the final conversion.
Use Media Mix Modelling (MMM) to find the exact value of your marketing efforts
Most marketing strategies, no matter how thorough, lack an understanding of what really generates results. Media Mix Modelling shines a light on this by giving you a clear picture of how your marketing efforts work – and why.
Media Mix Modelling (MMM) is an advanced tool for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts across online and offline channels.
By carefully considering everything from digital ads and emails to TV ads, MMM gives you a holistic understanding of what’s working – and where to invest your resources.
Watch James Keating, CMO of Pleo, talk about how he works with marketing attribution and Media Mix Modelling for Pleo’s marketing efforts. [Timestamp: 16.49 - 18.03]
As James mentions in this clip, Media Mix Marketing is traditionally used primarily in B2C. We believe, however, that this method also has great potential in B2B.
The B2B sales process is rarely simple – and rarely linear. A LinkedIn ad might be the first point of contact while a tailored whitepaper converts decision-makers and a personal sales presentation closes the deal.
Media Mix Modelling helps make this cyclical (and sometimes confusing) process easier to understand. The result? A marketing budget where the effect of every £ spent is accounted for. In other words, it makes it easier to gauge the true value your marketing efforts bring to the table.
Create attribution models that document how your marketing efforts support company goals
There are few things more detrimental to business success than when marketing works in isolation from the overall business strategy. With nothing to link marketing efforts to company goals, it’s all too easy to lose direction.
If that wasn’t bad enough, it can lead to a situation where marketing lacks support from management and other departments – just because their contribution to the success of the business isn’t made clear.
This, of course, is something you’ll want to avoid. The question is – how do you avoid it?
The answer lies in attribution models, among other things: they show exactly how marketing contributes to the bottom line. Whether your goal is growth, increased customer loyalty or something else entirely, it’s essential to be able to show how marketing contributes to achieving that goal.
That’s why these models must be able to link concrete marketing activities – such as campaigns, ads or content marketing – to measurable results that mean something for your business.
For example, if your business is looking to increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) by 20% over the next two years, you need to be able to show how your marketing efforts – e.g. running campaigns to build stronger customer relationships – are contributing to this goal.
A well-documented attribution model can show how these campaigns have improved customer engagement, increased recurring purchases and created a higher CLV over time. When the connection becomes obvious for the finance team, it’ll be much easier for marketing to get support for their future branding efforts.
This way, you can ensure that marketing isn’t just seen as an expense, but as a driving factor of business growth. Instead of having to defend your marketing budget, you’ll be able to strategically guide the business in the right direction to achieve its goals.
