Most businesses use multiple marketing channels to get the word out about their products and services. How they allocate resources to each effort is determined by campaign results, so it’s critical to get credit for your marketing efforts. Let’s look at what marketing attribution is, why you might be losing attribution, and how to identify your conversions.
What Is Marketing Attribution?
Marketing attribution determines which marketing effort gets credit for a sales or lead conversion. This process analyzes response data. Marketers use a variety of methods to assign credit; some of which are listed below.
- Last Touch: The most common method is last touch because digital platforms typically have it set up as their default process. This attributes the conversion to the last marketing channel interacted with prior to the transaction.
- First Touch: This method gives credit to the first touch the prospect received or interacted with.
- Linear: A linear model assigns equal credit to each marketing piece involved.
- W-Model: This model assigns the most credit to the first and last touches, but it also gives a large credit to the middle touch point.
- Z-Model: This method functions similarly, giving the highest credits to the first, middle, and last touch, but also attributes some credit to the other touch points in the middle.
- Algorithms: Analysts create custom algorithms that factor in all channels involved and distribute final credits.
While there’s a lot of reasons to use the different methods, keep in mind that it takes multiple advertising touches to win a lead or sale. Each channel has a part to play in moving your prospects further down the sales funnel. Knowing how your customers are interacting with the different channels used is important. But ultimately, you want to focus on who was targeted and who completed a transaction.
Losing Attribution
Today’s marketing involves many different channels and ways of responding. When used strategically, this offers more chances to get in front of your audience and more opportunities for them to make a purchase. However, it also makes it difficult to track responses.
You can include discount codes, PURLs, QR Codes, and special URLs to track who is responding. These elements can help identify some of your responses, but not all of your responders will use them. Some prospects will see a display ad and enter your website URL directly. They might see your TV ad and type your company name into a search engine. While others might receive your direct mail piece or email and forget to use the coupon when they make an in-store purchase.
If you don’t connect who you targeted with who responded, other advertising efforts could be claiming the transaction.
Identify Your Conversions
Customer Data
In order to get credit for your conversions, you need to have good customer data. Before launching your campaign, clean and update your data files. This step ensures you have the most recent prospect information, and that the email and postal addresses are deliverable. If your customer data file is incomplete or hasn’t been updated, you may not be able to match up your data list to the response file.
Capture Response Data
How ever prospects respond to your offer, whether it’s a phone call, online form, or in-store purchase, create a system to capture their information. If your sales spike and you don’t collect purchase data, you won’t know where the high volume of transactions came from. It will be difficult to know what worked and if it’s possible to repeat.
Determine what information you need to know and create a quick and easy way to gather that information from your customers at the transaction point. Even gathering some information is better than nothing.
Run a Response Analysis
A response analysis is a data analytics model that matches up your target marketing list with your transaction file. This process will identify the households you targeted that responded, giving you credit for your conversions.
Regardless of the path a customer takes to make a purchase, you can accurately attribute conversions to your efforts. Not only can you see who is responding, so you can find others like them, but you can also see who isn’t responding and update your marketing list.
Creating a continuous feedback loop in your marketing enables you to reduce marketing waste. You can zero in on your top performing prospects and expand into look-a-like audiences.
If you want to see how well your marketing is performing, give us a call.