Case study: Attribution & Reporting

The ideal solution for the business was to invest in operations with dedicated headcounts to include a manager and analyst, however, without showing ROI there was no case for further investment. It was a catch 22. The priority from a business perspective was simply: Show ROI as quickly as possible. This was expanded to be:

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1. Implement a standardised attribution process for all activities.

2. Produce a monthly report showing activities and actual results.

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The first priority was:

Implement a standardised attribution process for all activities

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There are a number of nuances that came into this request, namely:

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• How can both online and offline activities be tracked?

• How will this data pull through multiple touchpoints or systems?

• How will this be added to the pipeline? 

• What about companies with multiple decision makers?

• Is it possible to differentiate between different campaigns?
   

The first action to address any of these was to set up a simple UTM process and to instruct the team that all digital activities needed to be tagged. Each day new activities were checked until it became second nature and the process was running smoothly. As part of this, new campaign naming conventions were introduced to ensure all activities could be tied back to the overarching campaign.

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All phone numbers and emails were removed from collateral (e.g. product brochures or videos) and instead prospects were guided to the website to find out more, with a UTM embedded link. The team also took control of the email inbox that was present on previous collateral with any new enquiries forwarded to the Inside Sales team for pre-qualification.

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Inside Sales were asked to add a lead source to sales reports to show how many queries we were sending them, how many qualified and how many went onto the pipeline. Initially this was managed through spreadsheets whilst the process was tested and optimised.

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To solve for offline events, event codes were created and shared with sales teams to add to any new pipeline creations. Naturally this wasn't the most successful (who likes admin?) However, alongside this, all event data was sent directly to the operations team who would manually cross check new leads with attendees. This was the start of indirect attribution, where there was a strong assumption or logic that the marketing activity has influenced the lead.

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Optimisation
Introducing attribution opened up a whole new world of problems which were addressed as time went on as part of ongoing optimisation. Building strong relationships with the sales teams meant issues were spotted quickly and solutions tried and tested. 

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It quickly became apparent that whilst activities were starting to show up on the pipeline, there was a disconnect between the technologies. In the website analytics all UTM codes were pulling through correctly but not being passed through to sales. That meant all activities were simply showing as a website activity, despite advertising, social or email campaigns having driven that individual to the site. To resolve this, Javascript and hidden fields were added to pull all UTM information from the URL and pass them through to sales. 

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An even bigger problem was occurring, the sales team were losing faith in marketing activities. Now there was more visibility on leads, so were the conversions, and a number of different issues were raised. Initially, all marketing leads were added with an assumed value from the inside sales team, however, this was proving to be inaccurate. That meant, the £100k deal a salesperson was picking up was only actually worth £20k - so they stopped picking them up. To counter this, all leads were added with a nominal value but this had an even worse impact - the business began to believe that the 100 marketing leads were worth less than sales leads, and therefore not worth processing. This was a drastic problem. To counter it a full project was established to introduce and redefine lead qualification processes.

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The next challenge came as the business began asking specific details about specific activities, such as: How much ROI did the eBook bring? Why haven’t we seen a positive ROI on the latest video? This showcased an education issue to how business purchase (lead times & multiple stakeholders) but also highlighted an issue with using a single touch attribution model. It was time to upgrade which is where account attribution was introduced. The concept was simple, ensure that for each campaign there is a clear audience and this audience is not present elsewhere. Then, ensure attribution for all activities are linked to this audience. As an example, each audience may have 10 accounts, e.g. Business 1, Business 2, Business 3. And each of these accounts will have up to 25 individuals - and each of these individuals will be engaging at different parts of the campaign. A CEO may only engage when you’re ready to sign, but an account manager or senior leader may be the initial point of contact and engage with everything. Once the audience is defined, attribution is then done at a campaign level. It doesn’t matter who converts within this audience, only that someone does. It is not a failure if only one individual out of 10 at the same company converts - and it really doesn’t matter which piece of content is the last piece they read before converting!