Measuring B2B marketing performance across platforms and channels is one of the biggest challenges that organizations are facing. In fact, in a recent study from Demand Gen Report, it was the most commonly cited obstacle holding organizations back from rating their ability to track and analyze marketing data as excellent. Almost half (47 percent) of the marketers asked chose this as their number one challenge.
For marketers, understanding the value that each marketing channel brings is a crucial component of determining where marketing dollars are best used. It ensures that your focus is on areas that drive sales and grow revenue. However, this isn’t always a simple task to complete. Customers often take multiple paths that ultimately lead to making a purchase. Measuring the impact of each touch-point along the buyer’s journey can make it difficult to determine which channel, campaign, or platform should get credited with the conversion.
That’s where attribution modeling comes in, and there are various ways that marketers approach it. Attribution modeling helps measure the value of each channel along the customer journey. This ensures that marketing dollars are spent wisely.
There are various marketing attribution models that fall under two categories, single-touch and multi-touch attribution.
There are two models in this category:
You can see that these two models are conflicting. Consider this example, a potential buyer first clicks on a Facebook ad for a product and views the product description. From that webpage, the individual clicks on the site’s blog, reads a post about the product, and then subscribes to the blog. A week later, the prospect uses organic search to get to the business’s website and makes a purchase. First-touch attribution would credit the Facebook ad for the sale, while last-touch would credit organic search.
Multi-touch attribution models aim to better understand the customers’ entire buying journey, instead of just the first or last step that led to a purchase. There are several types of models that fall under the multi-touch category:
If only this were an easy question to answer. Unfortunately, it isn’t. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all attribution model for B2B marketing. In some cases, you may have to use multiple different models to get the most accurate view of attribution. However, there are some important questions to ask yourself that will help you make the right choices:
While attribution isn’t the only thing you need to optimize marketing budgets, proper attribution will provide you with insights that will help you focus on the most effective channels for the organization.
Do you need help deciding and setting up the proper attribution model for your business? Reliable Acorn is experienced with several forms of web analytics and can help. Contact us today.
Reliable Acorn will help you create a custom digital marketing strategy that does just that.
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