Your marketing efforts may be measured on a specific set of outcomes, such as more marketing qualified leads, increased sales, repeat sales, or many other potential metrics. Unless you’re looking at the entire customer journey you may be missing out on some key opportunities to grow customer revenue, loyalty, and referral opportunities.

Let’s explore a few reasons why it is so important to understand the entire buyer’s journey.

A single point in time doesn’t show the whole picture

What a difference a phone call can make. Have you ever loved a product or service all through the sales process, but as soon as something goes wrong, the customer support function completely fails you? If that company were to just look at a single point in time, they might think you are a happy customer, but in reality, you’re unlikely to buy their product again, or recommend it to others after your most recent experience.

If you look at your marketing and sales process alone, you might see some similar things. For instance, do you do a great job of educating your customers, only to then have a hard time differentiating your product from your biggest competitors? This is where multi-touch attribution, combined with a more holistic approach to evaluating your customer journey can pay dividends.

Make sure that customers are moving seamlessly from point to point during the marketing and sales journey, and identify points of friction to improve them once you have a big picture view. Start from the outside in, because often the things you know how to improve, or can most easily improve, may not be the areas that actually need the most attention.

While single interactions can make a big difference in whether or not you make a sale, keeping the whole picture in mind by understanding and improving the customer journey will pay great dividends. Customer satisfaction is made up of a string of experiences throughout the journey. Therefore, success at a single stage in the customer journey doesn’t guarantee success. Looking at the customer journey as a whole will help you avoid problem areas that take otherwise happy customers and turn them away.

A holistic customer experience is key to long-term success

It is well understood that customer experience is now a primary point of competition and differentiation among businesses. According to a recent study, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. This includes having a great overall experience, as well as a more tailored one, where 49% of buyers have said they made impulse purchases when receiving personalized offers.

Customer experience is defined as the overall perception of their experience, not the experience at a single point in time. While you may be laser focused on increasing conversions at specific points in time, make sure you can see the forest for the trees. Short term gains can be good, but thinking holistically about building long-term customers, as well as building marketing and sales funnels that perform as a whole can provide even better returns over time.

Make sure that, for all the work that you will do to create a robust customer journey, you always keep the customer first. This helps ensure that you get long-term results, not simply a short-term gain.

Taking the entire customer journey into account can translate into more meaningful, long-term results. This means that customers will appreciate the thoughtfulness you put into making their entire experience easier and more rewarding, and your team will reap the benefits of that through increase sales, better word of mouth, and more repeat purchases. As they say, “it’s the journey, not the destination.”

Attribution can help you take a bigger picture look at your advertising and marketing efforts to make sure that you aren’t losing sight of opportunities to make a bigger impact on your customers’ needs. For more information read more about our product or request a demo.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses are constantly seeking ways to gain deeper insights into their marketing efforts. Understanding the full customer journey, both online and offline, is essential for optimizing marketing strategies and driving better results. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the integration with CallRail and Attribution. The integration will empower businesses to treat every inbound and outbound call as a crucial visit in their attribution model.

Combining online and offline customer interactions in attribution modeling provides a comprehensive view of campaign performance. With this integration, businesses can accurately track the impact of their marketing efforts across all channels, from digital ads to phone calls. This holistic approach enables marketers to optimize their strategies to generate not only online conversions but also inbound and outbound calls, maximizing their overall marketing ROI.
One of the key benefits of this integration is the flexibility it offers in data analysis. Businesses can now expand their attribution modeling beyond digital channels to encompass all go-to-market activities, including offline interactions such as phone calls. This expanded dataset provides a more accurate representation of campaign performance and allows for better-informed decision-making.

Importantly, the integration with CallRail ensures that businesses can maintain the accuracy, trust, and auditability of their data. Focusing on real customer interactions, businesses can ensure that every event tracked in their attribution model provides valuable insights into who the customer is, what they did, and when they did it.

With our CallRail integration, businesses can unlock a wealth of new opportunities for optimizing their marketing strategies. They can identify which campaigns are driving both online conversions and phone calls, allowing for more targeted and effective marketing efforts. By treating every call as a visit in the attribution model, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of the customer journey and make data-driven decisions to drive growth and success.
The integration of CallRail represents a significant advancement in marketing analytics and our continued commitment to keep innovating. By combining online and offline customer interactions, businesses can gain a comprehensive view of their campaign performance and optimize their marketing strategies to generate both online conversions and inbound/outbound calls.

If you are using CallRail and would like to learn more about the integration and how the combination with Attribution can provide deeper insights, please reach out to our team and schedule a demo.

Attribution is a marketing analytics platform that provides marketers with insights to understand the cost, revenue and profit resulting from marketing programs. The Attribution marketing analytics platform provides marketers with the insights to understand the cost, revenue and profit resulting from marketing programs by channel and down to the individual customer level so they can make better decisions, faster and with more confidence than ever before.

We are thrilled and excited to be continually recognized by our customers!  Providing world class customer service is foundational to any company’s success and we are grateful to be recognized by our customers for this.  Furthermore, time to value is critical for companies who make investments in martech.  The sooner customers can be up and running with their investments in martech, provides many benefits to the customer as well as create a higher rate of retention for vendors. 

At Attribution, we are determined to empower marketers with the insights they need to understand the cost, revenue and profit resulting from marketing programs.  Our goal is to provide transparency for the C suite on true ROAS (Return On As Spend).

Being recognized in 4 categories by G2 Crowd for Spring 2024 is a testament to the hard work and dedication to our customers in ensuring they are successful.  We strive to help our customers grow their business and we value and welcome honest feedback from our community.

Here’s what some of our customers had to say:

• “Only attribution tool that does what I need”
• “Easy & Accurate Tool for Custom Attribution — team responds to complex needs!”
• “Its out of the box functionality to tie an ad click to spend saved tedious tracking work, thus freeing up my clients for more worthwhile analysis.”

Our company mission is to empower every marketer with the data to optimize their spend in marketing to revenue. This central tenet is our inspiration to challenge conventional marketing attribution norms and build a different multi-touch attribution platform that features a patent-pending attribution engine, cohort-based analytics, proven usability, and integration with an extensive and growing list of ad platforms including LinkedIn, Google, Quora, and Facebooks, as well as all major conversion platforms such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Segment, and Shopify.

To learn more about these distinctions, see how Attribution stacks up against other multi-touch attribution vendors, please reach out to our team and schedule a demo.  

To all our customers who submitted reviews, thank you! We will continue our mission to empower every marketer with the data to deliver amazing performance!

A seamlessly integrated marketing technology stack is indispensable to meet business goals and objectives. The crucial aspect is integration or in other words, how well systems share customer data with each other.  It is imperative to have data accessible across all systems and to ensure that each system can share data with the others. This unified approach enables businesses to make decisions based on a cohesive dataset that can be easily shared throughout the entire martech stack.

As we continue to deepen our investments in partnerships and provide our customers with the transparency they require to make informed decisions more rapidly, we are thrilled to introduce our enhanced integration with Segment, which shares data bidirectionally between the Attribution platform and the Segment platform.

Through the rich set of insights  provided by Attribution, which captures cost and revenue from various marketing channels (ad platforms such as Facebook and Google, social channels, affiliate, email and others) marketers gain a deeper understanding on performance that allows them to better target efforts on the channels that are working and spend less on the ones that are not.

The Attribution integration to Segment  accesses user traits such as customer lifetime value (LTV), advertising costs, attribution percentages, and more, across your entire technology ecosystem. This empowers your product analytics tools to merge sales and marketing analytics to:

• Identify which campaigns are driving the acquisition of high-value users.
• Determine which channels are contributing to drop-offs between events in the user journey.
• Analyze which initial touchpoints are associated with users exhibiting the highest LTV.

We are enthusiastic about supporting Segment’s use case of optimizing ad spend, and we look forward to enabling businesses to leverage their data effectively to drive better marketing outcomes.

Segment

You can download Segment’s ROAS: The Ultimate Guide to Advertising Efficiency HERE.

Attribution

For more information about our integration with Segment and how we can drive greater efficiencies with your advertising spend, please schedule a demo with us HERE or reach out to us at help@attributionapp.com.

What is multi-touch attribution marketing?

Multi-touch attribution is the practice of assigning credit to marketing touchpoints in proportion to their impact in driving a desired conversion outcome. The operative term here is “proportion.” Multi-touch attribution models collect data from all touches in the buyer’s journey and assign proportionate credit based on the attribution weightings of a model, thereby accurately reflecting their impact (or not) in generating a sale or a specified conversion event.

For example, if a prospect or visitor comes to your website through a search ad, converts to a lead on a newsletter, engages in person with a sales person, and revisits your website through a remarketing ad to make a purchase for $100, multi-touch attribution (using a linear model for illustrative purposes) would assign $25 in proportionate revenue credit to each of the four touches. And depending on your view of the impact of the recency of the touch, multi-touch attribution models come in different models to easily fit your strategy.

Unlike multi-channel attribution, multi-touch attribution can track any marketing touch with a deep level of granularity, such as online channels (any source, medium, campaign, etc.), events (any sales touch), email campaigns, and even direct mail, mobile devices and television.

What problem does multi-touch attribution marketing solve?

Remember the earlier word, “proportionate”? The problem is single-touch attribution allocates a disproportionate amount of revenue credit to either the first or last touch. If your customers’ purchase path is straightforward, single touch attribution is an adequate method of informing budget allocation using tools like Google Analytics, CRM or ecommerce. However, like most modern B2B and B2C businesses, you’re probably marketing through multiple paid platforms and marketing channels including offline, single-touch attribution misrepresents ROI by giving 100% revenue credit to either the first or last, woefully understating the impact of other touches and channels.

For example, if a prospect or visitor comes to your website through a search ad, converts to a lead on a newsletter, engages in person with a sales person, and revisits your website through a remarketing ad to make a purchase for $100, multi-touch attribution (using a linear model for illustrative purposes) would assign $15 in proportionate revenue credit to each of the six touches. And depending on your view of the impact of the recency of the touch, multi-touch attribution models different models to easily fit your strategy.

Further, single-touch attribution data from ad-specific ad sources such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights often double-count revenue with each source claiming 100% revenue credit to a sale. With this “attribution anarchy,” marketers can’t make data-informed decisions as to which channels and campaigns are worth spending more dollars on and which ones are wasting dollars.

What are the different multi-touch attribution models? Which one is right for my marketing?

While single-touch attribution only gives credit to one marketing touchpoint, multi-touch attribution models assume all touchpoints play some role in driving a conversion such as a lead, pipeline or a sale. Here we’ll look at the most popular multi-touch attribution models and how you can choose the one that’s best for your marketing.

Linear multi-touch attribution model

A linear or “impartial” model is the baseline for multi-touch attribution models. It assigns an equal percentage of revenue credit to each touch regardless of its recency in the buying journey. Hence, using the earlier example, each touchpoint receives an equal $15 in revenue credit, totaling $100.

If you don’t have a strong view of the value of when the touch took place in the buying journey, then a linear model is an excellent starting point. Don’t try to boil the ocean! The good news is with a modern multi-touch attribution tool you can easily toggle between attribution models to see the differences and start learning.

Time-decay multi-touch attribution model

A time-decay model assigns revenue credit to each touch based in accordance to its recency in the buying journey. Whereas a linear model gives equal credit, a time-decay multi-touch attribution model says the closer the touch was to the sale or conversion event, the more influential it was. Using the same buyer journey, you can see the more recent touches receive more credit than the older ones.

If you believe strongly (and have some supporting data) that more credit should be allocated to touches that nudged prospect closer to a sale vs touches that brought the lead or buyer in, then a time-decay multi-touch attribution model is the way to go.

Position-based (or U or W-shaped) multi-touch attribution model

A position-based (or U or W-shaped) model assigns 40% revenue credit to the first and last touch prior to the conversion event or sale, with the remaining 20% distributed equally among the middle touches. If there is only one touch before a conversion event or sale, then a position-based multi-touch attribution model would give 100% revenue credit to the touch. Similarly, if there is only a first and last touch, they each receive 50%.

Let’s look at our example to see how these models work:

Note: A W-shaped model works the same as a U-shaped model except it allocates 30% revenue credit each to the first, key middle, and last touch, while distributing equally the remaining 10% among other middle touches.

If your business places more value on the touch that brought in the initial prospect and the touch that converted them compared to the middle of the buyer journey touches, then you should use a position-based multi-touch attribution model to optimize your campaigns and channels.

Data-driven machine learning multi-touch attribution model

Custom machine learning modeling is the most advanced approach to multi-touch attribution. A custom model uses a machine learning algorithm to assign revenue credits to touches. Rather than using a static model with user-determined weightings as in the above examples, an algorithm is derived using historical touch and conversion data. As you can see in the example below, data-driven modeling applies a unique algorithm to allocate credits.

It is for this reason you should not expend the effort with it until after you’ve gone through at least one or two full path buying cycles using one or more of the static models. If you’re business is direct-to-consumer with a short purchase path, this means a matter of a few weeks, buy if you’re dealing with longer B2B buyer journeys I would learn from the static models for a good six or more months depending on your sales cycle to determine if there is ample opportunity to further optimize your marketing mix.

There’s no perfect science for choosing the right multi-touch attribution model. As the use of multi-touch attribution to optimize budgets and channels matures, marketers will run several models at one time to see which one is right for their business. The good news is modern multi-touch attribution tools allow you to see and compare the results from each model.

How do I know I am ready for multi-touch attribution marketing?

Regardless of whether you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, multi-touch attribution is worth the effort if you’re on the hook for lead or pipeline generation and/or customer acquisition or purchase, AND you’re:

1. Using multiple digital ad networks such as Google, LinkedIn, AdRoll, Facebook, and others. As the number of ad channels grow, single-touch attribution crumbles under the tracking complexity. With less linear and more complicated customer purchase paths, multi-touch attribution effectively manages the attribution intricacies of different ad channels (and the products and metrics within each channel required) for informing budget and revenue allocation across the different ad platforms.
2. Using or considering using offline channels such as direct mail, conferences, stores and/or sales touches, AND want a consistent way of attributing and comparing revenue and cost credits. The minute you do offline marketing is the moment single-touch attribution tools such as Google Analytics become useless in giving you holistic and accurate visibility of the ROI of your online and offline channels. Multi-touch attribution is channel-neutral, thereby allowing you to accurately compare ‘apples to apples’ ROI between online advertising and event spending, as well as the insight within each offline channel.
3. Using or considering using SEO to spur brand awareness and qualified traffic to your site, AND you want a consistent way of attributing and comparing revenue and cost credits from this channel to others. Here only multi-touch attribution can connect anonymous touches from your blogs and web pages, and accurately assign revenue and cost using the same model (and conversion data) as your other channels.
4. Spending more than $250,000 annually to drive B2C sales or $500,000 annually to generate qualified B2B leads or pipeline. This is considered a general inflection point where your marketing efforts are increasingly better spent on knowing which channels and campaigns are working and which ones need to be purged for poor ROI vs getting mired in attribution chaos due to lack of true attribution insight.
5. Starting to boil over the frustration associated with trying to optimize budgets using single-touch attribution from one or more tools, exceeding the effort to switch to a multi-touch attribution., which is why you’ll want to look at the change as a journey using the above guidelines when considering the different attribution models.

If you have a short and simple marketing funnel, a single-touch model may be good enough. But if you’re marketing on various channels, have many touch points and are nearing “attribution anarchy” with single-touch tracking, you’re ready to move to multi-touch attribution marketing. Now.

Multi-touch attribution marketing is both a technology and culture

Because buyer journeys span many touchpoints and devices before converting, marketers need to understand which touchpoints a buyer (or buyers in the case of B2B account-based marketing) interacted with that resulted in a positive action. The goal is to understand where to focus spend, devoting funds to higher performing channels and campaigns and diverting dollars from those that were ineffective, making the change to multi-touch attribution marketing is as much a culture shift as it is a new technology. With the click of a mouse, it enables marketers to look at all channels and attribute the sale to those touches using various models. Marketers can look at user-level data (clicks, forms) their touches have on key conversion goals such as leads, signups and purchases. Unlike single-touch attribution, multi-touch attribution models enable marketers to better understand both the chronology and the type of interactions that preceded and influenced conversions, using the insight to optimize the conversion paths of buyers.