Marketing Attribution or Marketing Influence?

Marketing attribution is a term that appears to strike fear into a lot of marketers. It’s usually based on an expectation to get it right, to know the data inside out and be confident in rebuking challenges, or at least being able to defend the numbers. This is hard. It’s even harder when there are stakeholders that don’t believe in marketing. 

Most marketers know that attribution isn’t concrete, there are so many external factors that influence an individual’s decision to purchase - especially in B2B where cycles are longer and the decision needs 5 sign offs. So when stakeholders ask “was radio advertising really worth it?” or they claim “SEO doesn’t work for my clients” it can be daunting, as they’re pulling on some of those insecurities that marketers have. 

The reality is that attribution isn’t 100% accurate. But it should provide a talking point and guidance on where to spend more of your efforts. And you need to be open to being wrong (and willing to pivot).

Are we wasting our time?

Absolutely not. Attribution is not just about the data, it’s about showing the business that there is a clear influence and correlation between marketing activity, leads and revenue. Marketers are usually seen as less effective than sales teams (which is why sales is one of the first areas to get investment). And why wouldn’t you? Sales are constantly focused on their numbers. They can tell you exactly how many people they’re speaking to, the total contracts they’ve signed, and the pipeline they’re building. 

If marketing wants the same investment, we have to be able to talk that same talk.

So, how do we do it?

There’s no one way to do it, but here’s 5 different methods you could consider, with varying degrees of difficulty and direct impact:

UTM codes

This is the starter move for attribution and is typically paired with a direct single channel (or touchpoint) to provide a report that tells you where your leads or revenue has come from. You create a code which is added onto any link that you send externally so when somebody clicks on it you can refer back to the code and know where they found it. 

Great for: 

Showing initial marketing impact. If you’re going from zero visibility to wanting something, this is extremely easy to set up and you’ll start seeing the results in your Google Analytics.

Tracking simple offline campaigns to your site. If you do events or magazine adverts where there’s a link or QR code, adding a UTM code to the end or your URL will tell you how much traffic you get and how many convert. 

Not great for: 

The influence on longer journeys. If your time to purchase takes 3 months, all you’re going to see with UTMs is one touch point or multiple touchpoints for one person that are almost impossible to combine. This means you won’t get a clear picture of how content or activities are working across the whole marketing funnel, only one snapshot in time.

When there's more than one buyer or individual who will be looking at your content. Similar to above, if 3 or 4 people need to be influenced throughout your campaign you’re going to lose this information as you’re only going to be focused on the person who does the final action*. That person could be an admin who’s been forwarded an email and instructed by a director (who’s engaged with 5 activities) to request a meeting. UTMs will show that an email is the piece of content that converts and the buyer is an admin individual. If taken literally, this can cause big issues. *This might end up being multiple actions across the funnel, the first touch point or the final conversion. But the final action (“last click conversion”) is typically used as a default for most.

Influenced attribution

The opposite of direct attribution but incredibly important to tell a story. This is where you look at activities that have happened and the consequent data to understand whether it influenced the results. For example, if you ran a webinar targeted at UK fintechs about a specific product or problem, and 4 weeks’ later you see an increase in UK fintechs on the pipeline for the same product, it’s likely there was an influence here. 

Great for:

Connecting the dots when multiple channels are used to drive users to one final event or experience. If you’ve been targeting an individual across multiple campaigns who begins to show engagement or is added to the pipeline 

Not great for:

Convincing those who don’t believe in marketing’s impact. There are a lot of “what ifs” associated with this style of attribution. How do you know they wouldn’t have purchased it anyway? What if sales were already talking to the person? You need to be confident in the link and ideally get an agreed definition that the business understands and believes.

Account based marketing (ABM)

This is about companies (or accounts) rather than individuals and is great when you’ve got complicated buying cycles, such as in B2B. With this methodology you’re selecting a number of businesses and targeting multiple individuals at the company - who converts or ends up on the pipeline is irrelevant, only that it’s someone from the company you’ve been targeting.

Great for:

Campaign-specific attribution. The idea behind account-based attribution is that you know who you’re targeting and you spend months working on your messaging and positioning across multiple channels. You can work with sales teams to define a list and then work together to get the companies over the line - when they’re on the pipeline you can then look back and see which pieces of content or activities were engaged with most in order to optimise your next campaign. But a word of warning, stay away from trying to identify the single piece of activity that converted them, there will be so many factors behind the scene that you don’t want to fall into the trap of tying a 3-4 month multiple person campaign to one piece of content or event.

Not great for:

Multiple messaging that’s targeted at the same company. This is where a lot of people fall down, this type of attribution requires specific messaging that’s aligned throughout the business. So, regardless of whether the CEO or marketing director is talking to you, they’re being informed about the same stuff. The same for sales, if they’re trying to flog a different product or message then you need to be careful about claiming attribution. It’s important to make sure you’re aligned and on the same page. 

Quick or low value sales. Due to the nature of ABM, it takes time and requires a lot of investment. This isn’t great for businesses that want numbers. Account based marketing might deliver you 3 leads in 6 months, but hammering your email database could give you 40. The difference would (and should!) be the value. Those 3 leads should be worth more than all of the other 40 put together. Whether it’s worth the investment would depend on your business, but it’s probably not ideal to put all of your eggs in this one attribution or tactical basket.

Footfall

This is a little “old school” for digital minded people but important nonetheless. The basic premise is that you can start tracking any increase in footfall in your stores based on population increases. The tracking is indirect as you can’t tie it back to individuals but worth a look at if you’re struggling to understand large media impact in key areas.

Great for:

If you’re a business with online/offline point of sales e.g. you’ve got some stores where people can buy products you’re emailing them about (or advertising on TV), then this could be a great way to show some impact. 

Not great for:

Knowing specifically who’s buying and from what campaigns unless you’ve got other data points collected at the point of purchase, such as: personal data (for emailing receipts), unique voucher codes, or loyalty cards (think Clubcard or Nectar).

Uplift

This is another indirect method that’s great to run a few times a year. The concept is very much split testing or A/B campaigns where you run activities in key areas and not in the rest. The control area that doesn’t receive any new marketing is your baseline and the difference between this and the area(s) that receive the new marketing is your uplift. Doing some very basic maths, you could have 400 new sales on average in each city each month, but the areas with your latest marketing campaign have had 500. That means your uplift is 100 (or 25%) which is the stat you can use when in board meetings to recommend investment in activities. Again, it’s really important you get buy-in for this as otherwise it can be an arbitrary number. 

Great for:

Businesses with complicated buying journeys. Some businesses won’t necessarily offer direct purchases or ecommerce transactions. Rather, it could either include a more consultative approach either direct or through intermediaries (a good example is manufacturers who sell through wholesalers). There are lots of ways to lose direct attribution in this instance so understanding the impact of marketing vs. not doing marketing can be a powerful way to continue investment.

Not great for:

Specific campaign tracking. Whilst you can split test every campaign to see the impact, at some point you’re going to want to go wider or run different campaigns at the same time. This will get messy and complex really quickly and become difficult to pinpoint success. Instead, focus on 2-3 uplift tests each year to maintain accurate numbers.

What should we communicate?

You’ll notice from the above that the majority of the examples are indirect. That’s because direct attribution is increasingly difficult with digital tracking and people’s buying habits - yet it’s still the expectation of business leaders. The conversation could arguably be that the word “attribution” is the thing that’s bringing these expectations and, if we move to expressing “marketing influence” we’d be much better placed. 

The continual conversation we’d recommend having with business leaders is that digital tracking is the hardest it's ever been, and it’s only going to get harder. But not investing in marketing will undoubtedly impact leads and revenue - and you can prove the influence of these with one of the methods above. If you can get one (or multiple) agreed numbers, you could tell a story that marketing provides a 10% increase in footfall, 25% uplift in sales, or 5x lead value.

Final thoughts

In the last 6 months there have been some big changes in the digital world, that makes attribution overall incredibly difficult. Two big ones are the Digital Marketers Act and Consent Mode. Both of which require businesses to ensure that cookies are not dropped on a browser without consent. 

In addition, ad blockers remain popular and a little known fact is that they can have a negative effect on your website tracking (think Google or Adobe Analytics data), which is an extra headache for any data-driven marketer. This lack of data has led to some businesses exploring server side tracking, which allows you to own all tracking on your website first, before sending it into your analytics platform. You by-pass the ad blockers whilst still collecting the consent mode and activity data. This isn’t without its issues though, the big one being that it’s an advanced set up and you’ll need someone who knows what they’re doing to set it up correctly.

There are lots of ways around the difficulties we’re facing with regulation and management expectations, but it’s not impossible. If you’re looking to tackle your own marketing influencing issues get in touch and we’ll see if we can help.