Today on the Demand Gen Pod, Episode 20, The transcript discusses the importance of attribution reporting in making informed marketing decisions. It explains that attribution reporting helps track the performance of different assets and their contribution to conversions. The challenges in meaningful attribution reporting include data collection, choosing the correct attribution model, and accurately attributing conversions to various touchpoints. The transcript suggests using first touch, last touch, or multitouch models for attribution. It emphasizes the need for clean and valid data through regular audits and quality checks. Customer journey mapping is also discussed as a way to understand conversion points and optimize marketing efforts accordingly. Multichannel and cross-device attribution require advanced tools and techniques to attribute overlapping touchpoints across different channels or devices. Key metrics for analysis include conversion rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), average order value, and ROI. Attribution insights can help optimize marketing strategies by reallocating resources or personalizing customer experiences based on effective touchpoints and channels identified through attribution reporting. Refining the attribution model over time is recommended to adapt to changes in customer behavior and market trends. Additionally, considering the sources of assets is important when analyzing their performance in generating revenue or ROI from paid ads versus other channels like email.
Summary notes from Episode 20:
Attribution reporting is crucial for understanding the impact of marketing
efforts Different attribution models include first touch, last touch, and
multitouch Sales teams benefit from focusing on what led to a conversion and
recent interests of leads Attribution can also apply to emails sent or opened
Data collection for attribution includes customer surveys, Pixel tracking, and
log files Customer journey mapping helps identify key conversion points
Challenges include attributing overlapping touch points and measuring channel
impact Tools like cross-channel attribution and a/b testing aid in accurate
attribution Cross-device attribution involves tracking devices used for
conversions Integration of data from various sources helps achieve a holistic
view of customer behavior
Full Transcript:
00:00
Welcome to the demand gen pod. My name is Ryan. Today we are talking about attribution reporting, and it’s so important because it helps us to make better decisions about the content that we are paying to build or paying to have built, paying to use. So we make investments into marketing contents, marketing content, and we take that and we apply it to our leads and to our customers with the ultimate goal of either converting them into accounts, contacts, customers, or converting customers again and again with upsell or Crosssell. So before any further ado, let’s get into it. If you do have a moment, I’d love for you to subscribe to the podcast. Whether you’re listening in your car and that’s on Spotify or Apple Music or something like that, or if you’re watching us on YouTube, that would be really cool, too.
00:51
Thank you so much. So, attribution reporting. It is important. All right. I mean, so without it, we are not necessarily able to make changes to our marketing efforts efficiently and accurately. So the general idea here is that you might want to say, I want to understand that if we release. Let’s keep it really simple. Two ebooks, okay? We release two ebooks. How much revenue? Or even if you’re not tying it down to revenue, how many conversions do each of those assets create? So does one perform better than the other? And then there’s another. The next step. And it kind of goes down a funnel, if you will. Right? So the next step is going to be knowing that we have a and b ebooks with conversion rates of, let’s say 5% one and 10% on the other. So that looks like double.
01:47
But what happens going from a lead to a contact or a lead to an account. Right? So if a contact gets created, but you actually have more people being created into contacts, converted into contacts from a, which converted at 5% from an unknown visitor to a lead. Well, that’s really important to know, too. And then the next step down the funnel, further down the funnel is going to be, what about when they actually convert into a customer who ends up spending more money? Now, obviously, you can’t attribute 100% of revenue for a particular contact, for a particular business or a particular person to a single asset. That’s just not reasonable. Okay. But it is really important to be able to say these assets as a whole contributed to this revenue. And that’s on the most high level.
02:41
There are lots of attribution models out there that will apply 10% of revenue to one asset and 5% to the next and 20% to the next one so that you can kind of get a holistic picture to say, well, this asset actually generated $1,000. And that’s great news because it cost us $3,000 to make. So we know that we realistically need just three conversions on this at the lead level in order to. That’s probably completely stupid, but let’s say three conversions into closed one in order to pay that off and break even on it. So that seems really positive, right? So that’s the general idea. The challenges are exactly that, though, right?
03:23
So challenges in meaningful attribution reporting include data collection and tracking, and then choosing that correct, the most correct and accurate attribution model, and then actually and accurately attributing conversions to different touch points because you may have contacts engaging with lots of different types of assets, your website being one of them, right? So your website assets that sales is sending, assets that marketing are sending conversions through paid. All of these things need to be taken into consideration, and so it can definitely get out of hand quite quickly. Now, if you’re a big company and you have the spending power, there are tools that will help you to do this. If you don’t, though, here are a couple of different approaches that you can take, which may be slightly less overwhelming.
04:11
So a couple of different models that you can look at are first touch, last touch, and multitouch. Okay, so the first touch attributes, basically all the credit to the first touch point that a customer interacts with. That’s first touch, pretty straightforward. Last touch, as you can probably imagine, attributes that credit to the final touch point before the conversion, and then multitouch point attributes credit, whether it’s distributed evenly or distributed differently, to multiple touch points throughout the customer journey. And it’s important for you to choose not only the most appropriate attribution model based on your goals and customer behavior industry, but also something that’s actually attainable. So generally speaking, what we do with clients is we will say, let’s do first touch, last touch, and we will track those. And those are the things that we’re looking at on the contact table level.
05:03
Okay, so inside of the CRM, inside of the contact object, first touch, last touch, those are there. Why? I think that this is really important, because if sales is contacting somebody who has engaged, they want to be able to see what got them to convert in the first place. So that is probably their peaked interest. And what have they been engaged with most recently? That very well may be the exact same asset, and that’s totally fine, but it’s I think really important for sales to be able to know that.
05:35
The other side of this that I think is important right along the same line, is that I don’t know how relevant it is for sales to be able to, at least in a particular view, say within a given object, or at least within the contact object or lead object or whatever the case may be on that contact record. Right. Or be able to see every single thing that person has done. Sales might disagree with me on that, but I would argue that it’s important to track that and keep it in an object, but maybe just not, and maybe even within a, maybe within a view inside of the object as like a widget, but not as contact fields, not as data fields that you’re tracking on the actual record itself.
06:18
I think what’s more important is to understand what got them to convert in the first place and then what they are most recently interested in and then the conversion dates for those things. I think that’s really important because then a sales rep can be able to look at that quite quickly. They don’t have to scour through everything, look at that quite quickly and discern, okay, well, I can see that you’re interested in this and that we caught your attention with this and that’s how they can guide that conversation. I think that’s more helpful on a glancing level than having every single thing that somebody’s done. So we’ve heard from sales teams in the past when we provided all of that. It’s too much. I don’t have time to look through and kind of figure out what I’m supposed to be looking at.
06:57
I just want to be told what to look at and then that’s what I’m going to be going off of. The other thing that we can do as well with attribution is attribute emails. Right? And this again kind of goes into the view section. Certainly in CRM tools, HubSpot Salesforce doesn’t really matter. You can have a section like kind of a widget that would show you the last emails that they were sent or opened. You can kind of customize it to whatever you want it to be and which one you would want it to do and you can attribute it to that too.
07:25
And so that can be really helpful, especially if your email marketing is consistent that your sales team has insight into, say, the last two or three emails that a contact was sent or opened, and you could easily mark that as such. So what about data collection and tracking? So we can collect data for attribution reporting through lots of different methods like customer surveys, Pixel tracking, log files. We can use tools and technologies like ones that you’re probably already using already. You may not even realize it. Google Analytics, certainly your CRM tool and marketing automation platforms, all of these tools. Google Analytics is going to track data at an aggregate level. So that’s something to keep in mind.
08:08
But while you cannot map a conversion to a certain person, to a specific person, to a specific contact through Google Analytics, it’s not going to tell you that John converted on this day. It’s going to tell you that someone converted on this day and you can apply revenue to that. And so it can track that attribution that way. CRM systems, obviously you can go down to an individual contact level, and certainly with marketing automation platforms as well, accurate and reliable data can be insured through regular data audits. I feel like a broken record on this one. Data validation processes and data quality checks. There’s a whole episode on this, so feel free to go back and listen to it. I’m not going to dive into it today, but it is really important.
08:52
I mean, it’s a recurring theme to make sure that your data is clean and valid and up to date. Another neat thing here is customer journey mapping. And that really matters in attribution reporting because it helps businesses to understand the various touch points to contribute to conversions. Right. So as you are building out your customer journey, you can look at conversion points where people are converting. What was the last asset that someone converted on before you moved them from a lead to a contact? What was the last asset that somebody converted on before you moved them from a contact account? I’m using like high level, it could be different in your organization, but say from a contact to an account that’s now closed one, what was the last asset that they engaged with before they gave you money? Right. So what were those things?
09:45
And you can take that information, you can go back to the drawing table and as you’re looking at your customer journey mapping, you can say, okay, I now see that the big conversion points were these assets and they happened at these times. Let’s include that in our customer journey mapping and make sure that if someone, say through lead scoring, because you need to do this exact same exercise with lead scoring, if someone hits a certain lead score, if they hit a certain threshold regarding interest or how likely they are to raise their hand, and you have some sort of modeling that is determining that, make sure that we funnel them to this resource at that time because we found that you are most likely to convert if you look at that resource. So just something to consider.
10:28
It sounds really complicated, but I don’t really think that it is. It’s a manual process, at least out of the gate, to do a lot of this attribution mapping. But once you’ve done it and you apply it to your customer journey, it’s pretty easy for a marketing automation tool for you to be able to go and say, if somebody meets the threshold, this is just a segment, send them this asset. Now you can identify and analyze different touch points along the customer journey, again through customer surveys, website analytics. You can use GA data for that, Google Analytics data for that, and customer behavior analysis.
11:04
And just how people are behaving on the website and with sales and with marketing and customer segmentation really plays a role here in understanding the customer journey and attribution by grouping customers based on similarities and then analyzing their journeys separately. Right. So again, just like you wouldn’t send an email, at least I hope that you’re not sending an email to your entire database just because you have them available. That same logic should be getting applied to this here too. So, okay, we know that the highest converting overall might be asset a.
11:41
But then when we dig into it and we see that we have maybe three different groups of people, kind of three different cohorts or segments of customers or leads that we want to convert to customers, well, it turns out that asset a is really only relevant to the third one, but asset d and b are relevant to the second and first one. So something else to keep in mind there is that you can drill down a little bit deeper in terms of understanding where assets are converting and who they’re converting for. And I think another good translation there is over to, or kind of transposition, I guess, is over to job title and any other demographic data that you want to leverage. So keep all of that in mind. So what about multichannel attribution? It takes some work and it takes some tools.
12:36
Effective multichannel attribution involves using advanced attribution models that consider all the marketing channels. So that is not just email, it is not just website, it is not just social, it is all of those, plus paid, plus referrals, plus partnerships. Whatever else you’re doing in how you’re managing your lead gen. And the challenges here are attributing overlapping touch points, dealing with your different channel marketing interactions, accurately measuring the impact of each channel. That can be really difficult and there are lots of tools to help you. But again, it really comes down to you understanding, or someone understanding your customer base your leads and the pain points and the conversion points and what that means. And that can take a lot of effort from a lot of different people in order to really get it.
13:28
Sometimes even coming down to simply discussing with sales what were the specific problems for these people. Let’s review that and include that in our analysis. But some ideas for accurate multichannel attribution, you can use cross channel attribution tools. You can analyze your customer paths and then you can certainly also conduct some a b testing as well to confirm your suspicions and guesses. What about cross device attribution? This is tricky. So cross device attribution can be tackled by using different techniques like device fingerprinting, deterministic and probabilistic matching. So something else to consider, and user logins too. So logins are probably the easiest way to do this. You can also track what devices people are using, but only if they’ve converted on those devices. So it makes it very difficult.
14:29
And then user logins are probably the most helpful way because it doesn’t matter what account they’re on, they’re effectively converting and providing you with information about the device that they’re on. When they sign into something. So somebody signs in from their phone, you now know that’s their phone. And that can be attributed over to website or to any other activity that they do across your web interfaces. Okay? And same thing on the desktop, same thing on their iPad, whatever. Otherwise, it’s awfully difficult, if not impossible, to be able to track multi cross device attribution. But certainly tools do. So analytics, Google Analytics will help you. There are different cross device tracking platforms and data management platforms, too.
15:13
All of this to say that a holistic view of customer behavior across multiple devices can be achieved by integrating data from different tracking sources and using different identity graphs. And again, it’s a lot, it’s not supposed to be easy, but it can certainly lead to some really interesting insights. What about data analysis and reporting? Like anything else that we do in marketing, key metrics and KPIs for attribution reporting are important and they include conversion rate, customer lifetime value. Sometimes that’s also known as completely drawing a blank on it, to be perfectly honest. Sorry, we’re going to skip over that one. But your lifetime value CLV, right, and then your average order value and ROI. Right.
16:07
So all of these are really important because what you’re able to say is we can see that as we shift and we make changes to our customer lifetime value, for example. Well, as we shift and we make changes to our assets and we try to optimize them, you should be seeing CLV go up, average order value go up and roi go up. That’s what you should be seeing. And if it’s going down, it can be really difficult to attribute where it’s going down, but you need to pause and reevaluate kind of where you’re at. Sorry for my flub. Attribution data can be analyzed through statistical models, data visualization techniques, and also marketing analytics tools too. And that visualization and reporting can be done with things like dashboards and charts and reports to help communicate attribution insights effectively.
17:03
And then a bit beyond that, attribution reporting really does help us to optimize our marketing strategies and identify the most effective touch points and channels. Right. So just to kind of close it all out, and you might look at actions for attribution insights based on reallocating resources or optimizing marketing campaigns, you can personalize customer experiences. Personalization is another one I think I talk about every single episode. We’re on episode 20 right now. And you should also not just sit down and call it a day. Right? So when you go through this process, look to iterate and refine your attribution model and your reporting process over time to adapt to the changes in customer behavior and in marketing trends, because all these things can shift.
17:47
So the other thing that I haven’t talked about yet, but something else that you want to consider is the sources for those assets. So where are the sources for the assets? Where are they coming from? It’s not only necessarily what they converted on, but also where they converted from. So also really important to look at. It’s very helpful because as you’re looking at that as part of your attribution, you can say, oh, hey, we spent $10,000 on paid and we generated $30,000 in revenue. Awesome. That sounds great. Or we spent $10,000 on paid and these exact same assets generated one and a half x RoI on email and they generated absolutely nothing on paid and we lost money on paid. So that’s good to know. So is that where you’re putting the money? Is that where you’re showing the ads?
18:32
Are those the ads themselves? So some things to look at there too. I hope this has been helpful today. I think that I step back from doing really deep dives into some of these things and I think I leave some kind of some big topics on the table as an opportunity to open discussion. And you can certainly do that with me. If you’d like, you can contact me at hello@demandgenpod.com. Again, it would be really wonderful if you could please subscribe to the podcast. That would be fantastic. And next week, we are talking about creating email subject lines. And it’s cool. I actually just did an email subject line test, which really surprised me. But we’re going to talk about some basics and kind of how to craft them.
19:16
So until next week, have a great rest of your week, a great weekend, and happy Thursday.