A Journey into Marketing Attribution: From Clueless to Cashflow

If you use marketing to generate leads  and sales, you probably want to know  
which of your marketing channels  is getting those leads and sales.  
That’s where marketing attribution can really  make a difference. If you’re not sure what  
marketing attribution is, you’re in luck, because  that’s just what we’re gonna cover in this video. 
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What is marketing attribution? Marketing attribution is a way  
of crediting different marketing channels  for the leads and conversions they drive.  
Those channels might include organic traffic,  paid advertising, social media, and more. 
You can use an analytics tool like GA4, a  customer relationship management (CRM) tool,  
a customer data platform (CDP), or even a  combination of all those tools to help you  
track the way people interact with your  marketing, particularly on your website. 
When those people convert, you can connect  each conversion with all of their marketing  
interactions. This helps you understand how  people got from the beginning of their buying  
journeys to the point when they’re ready to  convert. You’ll have a fuller understanding  
of your marketing, which channels work,  and where you need to fill in some gaps. 
When working with marketing attribution, you’ll  want to choose a model that assigns credit to  
different channels that helped close the sale.  There are plenty of options, and I’ll explain  
how it works in just a bit. But now, let’s  talk about why marketing attribution matters. 
Why is marketing attribution important? When someone converts, many businesses will  
give all the credit for the conversion to the last  marketing channel or material the customer viewed. 
But it’s rare for someone to become a customer  after encountering only one marketing material  
from your business. Usually, they’re gonna go  through several different marketing channels  
and campaigns before they convert. And those  earlier campaigns are just as important to  
understanding your marketing effectiveness  as the channel that got someone to convert. 
If you don’t give credit to all the marketing  materials that help turn someone into a customer,  
you’ll end up undervaluing them. With marketing  attribution, though, you can identify all of the  
tactics that worked and avoid that problem. Which attribution model do you need? 
Not everyone approaches marketing attribution  the same way, and your business’s needs  
shape that approach. You can generally split  marketing attribution into two different camps. 
In camp number one, you give credit to one  marketing channel for a conversion. Camp  
two gives credit to more than one channel. So, let’s define a conversion as someone  
contacting your business. One lead found  your website through Google, clicked on a  
social media ad, interacted with a blog post  you shared on social media, clicked through  
one of your email newsletters, and then later  contacted you via a link in a paid search ad. 
Some businesses may want to give all  the credit to the first interaction,  
since that’s what started the whole journey. In  this case, you’d credit Google, often referred  
to as SEO, organic, or organic search. Some may credit the conversion to the  
last interaction, which directly drove the  lead. It would be paid search in this example. 
Now the one channel approach could  work, especially if you have a short  
sales cycle where people don’t need to  interact with multiple channels before  
they reach out. This may be the case if your  offerings don’t require a massive investment,  
like a dashboard phone mount for a car. But if you have a longer sales cycle where  
people need to do their research before  making a commitment, the one channel camp  
might not be a good choice. So, instead of a  dashboard phone mount, you sell the whole car.  
That’s not something the average person buys on  a whim. In a situation like this, which requires  
a lot of research and a bigger investment, a one  channel approach discounts the role your marketing  
channels in the middle played in that conversion. While the channels in the middle of someone’s  
journey may not lead to a direct conversion,  they do influence someone’s decision to  
continue interacting with you. Each part of your  marketing keeps your business top of mind with  
your audience, builds trust, and helps you form  relationships that lead to contacts and sales. 
So, in the example, while social media  and email weren’t the last channels  
before that lead converted, they did play  an important role in that person’s journey. 
That leads me to our second camp  of marketing attribution models:  
giving credit to more than one channel. Within this camp, you have a lot of choices.  
You can assign equal credit to each channel for  a conversion. So in the example, organic search,  
paid social, organic social, email, and  paid search would all be credited equally. 
You can assign most of the credit to the first  and last channels and split the rest of the  
credit among the middle of the journey. So,  organic search and paid search would each get  
maybe 40% of the credit, and the three channels  in the middle would share the rest of the credit. 
You can also choose to give more credit  to the channels closer to the conversion,  
and less as the interactions occurred further from  the time your lead converted. So in the example,  
paid search would get the most credit, followed  by email, then organic social…you get it. 
If you want to get really granular, you can  assign different values to each touchpoint based  
on the revenue you made from a sale. That can be  complex and require some new tech to figure out.  
But it’s a really great way to understand which  channels have the most impact on people who become  
your customers, not just those who become leads. Either way, it’s up to you which model or models  
you want to use. Just pick whichever one you think  will do the best job of helping you optimize your  
future marketing. Or reach out to some marketing  attribution experts to help guide your decision. 
Well, that does it for this video. But if you  want to learn more about marketing attribution,  
or digital marketing in general, you can  always subscribe to our YouTube channel,  
or to our newsletter, Revenue Weekly. 
Thanks so much for watching, and  we’ll see ya in the next one!