Marketing Attribution

What is Attribution and what are its benefits?

Marketing attribution is the practice of understanding the customer journey from awareness to conversion that resulted in a specific sale. Effectively, which one of my marketing tactics can I attribute that sale to?

There are various benefits to marketing attribution including identifying and investing in your best performing tactics, understanding buyer behaviour and personalising messaging based on consumer preferences. 

This might sounds simple in practice but marketing attribution is actually highly complex and never 100% accurate.

The world we live in today typically sees a consumer using multiple devices, sometimes simultaneously. You might see an ad on TV and then jump on your smartphone to research the brand. That product might pop in your social media feed and you then talk to a friend about it who is a convert and convinces you to buy it online with his code. Do attribute the sale to the TV ad? To the friend? To all the channels equally?

The tactic or campaign you decide to attribute the conversion to will have an impact on how you allocate your advertising budget. Hence the importance of attribution. What works and what is a waste of money?

This also assumes that you can track your consumers. Online is easier that offline for obvious reasons. Even online though, new GDPR and privacy regulations as well as digitally savvy buyers make it increasingly hard to track behaviour. 

Furthermore, proper automation requires the analysis of a great amount of data from multiple analytics platforms and reports (Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, In store sales, etc.).

Marketing attribution is a highly complex area of marketing but it should be applied at all stages of growth and within businesses of all sizes. 

Here are some of them:

– Attribution

– Bizible

– Hive9

– C3 Metrics

– Windsor.ai

– Dreamdata