Marketing Attribution

You hate it, yet your boss is asking for it...how do you get around it?

I was a Bizible “All-Star” back in the day. I was an early adopter, but I also provided detailed feedback which helped them deliver a better product. Apparently my photo was on their wall in their office amongst other “all-stars” and I even received custom Bizible All-Star Converse, among other swag. So I guess this means I sort of know a little bit of what I’m talking about when it comes to attribution. You can be the judge after this article.

I love marketing attribution because I believe it tells a story about what’s working and what’s not working. Often you’re asked by the CEO, CFO, or Board to show your impact and attribution helps you tell this story. However, it’s been known to cause the “blame” game between sales and marketing, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

You don’t need attribution if everything is working, but usually it’s not and that’s why you were hired in the first place as CMO/VPM/Head of Marketing — to fix things.

There are many types of attribution

There are many types of attribution, the most familiar are first touch (FT), last touch (LT), multi-touch (MTA), and marketing mixed modeling (MMM). Sigh.

• First touch - helps measure how someone first came into your database. It also attributes 100% of the revenue associated with a closed won deal to the initial campaign touch. This can be either first touch (regardless of whether they converted/filled out a form, or lead conversion (the action that drove them to fill out a form).

• Last touch - helps you measure the last thing they did before they became an opportunity or an MQL (you decide). It also attributes 100% of the revenue to the last campaign touch prior to opportunity creation. [This is the salesforce.com model out of the box.]

• Multi-touch - helps you measure influence across the prospect journey through each channel, each campaign, etc. (you can really get down in the details here)

• Marketing mix modeling - helps you with a top down view of how everything aggregated together is working and it’s impact on sales

Attribution is an art

Attribution is all about storytelling. What story do you want to tell the Board? It’s our jobs as CMOs to figure out what that story is and set up the systems so that we have the data to prove out that story. Without data to support, the story is dead in the water.

Figure out what questions you want to answer. Here are some to consider:

1. Which campaigns/channels are:

   1. Building the database?

   2. Moving prospects through the funnel?

   3. Getting people into a sales engagement?

2. How do you optimize your channel mix and spend to maximize wins/revenue?

3. How do you optimize for:

   1. Getting more people into the funnel?

   2. Accelerating prospects through the funnel?

   3. Building pipeline?

4. Of the deals that have closed, which campaigns influenced those deals?

How far back should you measure

It depends. For most SaaS companies targeting MM/Enterprise, you should go back 9-12 months. (I personally like to go back 1 year because many times, events are the first time someone gets to know you, and those typically have 6-12 month ROIs, plus the math is just easier). If you’re targeting SMB, I wouldn’t go farther back than 6 months, but if you can convince your boss to go back 12 months, then go for it.

Anything beyond 12 months ago should not get attributed to Marketing unless you are targeting regulated industries such as Financial Services, FinTech, or Healthcare because those sales cycles are typically greater than one year.

The conundrums with FT and LT attribution models

Quick summary: Both FT and LT models do not represent the long and complex B2B customer journey. They undervalue mid-funnel programs such as Webinars, blogs, PR and more.