The Benefits of Digital Marketing Attribution Modeling

What if your best customers come through a channel you overlook?

Maybe it wasn’t the right decision to turn off that hight traffic Google Ads campaign because of no conversions? Those visitors might get back to your website a few times more and eventually buy your stuff.

Maybe it’s just you didn’t know it?

So if you want to measure the real effectiveness of your marketing dollars spent, keep on reading. We’ll break down what is marketing attribution modeling, what types are available, and which one might work for you.

What is marketing attribution modeling?

Marketing attribution modeling is an organized set of rules that attribute credits for different touchpoints across the customer journey.

In other words, a way for you to measure the real impact of your marketing activities.

Some paid marketers I know are obsessed with optimizing their campaigns for higher CTR and lower CPC. Those who look a bit further are optimizing for conversions instead, which seems logical. But conversions don’t always impact main targets in a way you think.

Not all customers have equal LTV, and not all campaigns are converting from the first touchpoint. I would even say, not every touchpoint is designed to convert. But you still need to measure its effectiveness. For B2B, these rules are especially true.

So you can continue optimizing your Facebook ad campaign for the best-in-class CTR or conversion rate. For sure, it may bring you hundreds of dollars plus. But on the scale of a business, you might be doing a tiny thing that doesn’t make a difference at all.

Your company’s success is your success. So you should optimize marketing towards the primary company goal – revenue. And if you’ve never thought this way, you definitely should start.

Examples of marketing attribution modeling:

Imagine you have a customer journey with a Google ad as the first touchpoint. By clicking the ad, people start engaging with your brand on social, webinars, whatever. And eventually, after a month or so, they type in your website address and buy your product.

Most likely, you’ll attribute revenue to direct or organic traffic and forget about what happened during this journey.

But it’s like getting your salary and saying it was not essential to do the job to get it.

So you can end up turning off a campaign that brings you customers just because it has a low conversion rate. But it can drive awareness like crazy. The thing is nobody cares.

During our project with Betty Bossi (case study here), there were multiple channels and even website pages tracked as a part of the customer journey. So each touchpoint was considered. And one essential and surprising insight was gained from the analysis. The Google Ads branding campaigns turned out to be invaluable in attracting customers who then return over organic channels. This was not visible using the standard, simplistic last-click attribution models.

Think about it.

Is marketing attribution modeling only for paid channels?
No, it is not.

With marketing attribution modeling tools, you can pull the data from your ad accounts, social media accounts, email provider, website, programmatic ad network, influencer marketing campaigns, etc. It even works with offline channels and TV advertising – it is called “Mix Modeling.”

It’s all about getting a full picture of your customer journeys and giving credits to marketing activities that deserve it.

Why Google Analytics is not always the answer
Many marketers use Google Analytics as a hub of their cross-channel marketing data. Google has some common attribution models to help you measure the performance of your marketing channel. But with adding more channels, like programmatic advertising, it becomes painful to measure the impact.

Sometimes, it makes much more sense to have all costs and conversions easily accessible in a dashboard and different attribution models compared on the same screen.

This way, you have much clearer and actionable data, save time, and even headcount. Of course, if you do it right.

Here you can read about 11 attribution models with some tips on when to use and to avoid each: https://www.windsor.ai/list-of-marketing-attribution-models/

P.S. Hate doing this, but it's a longread with images playing their role, so have to drop the link to the full article.

Please let me know if this topic is interesting for anyone. Preparing some really in-depth piece on b2b marketing attribution, but won't share here if no one needs it.