Marketing Attribution: It’s so important to your business, here’s why!
“You wouldn’t drive a car without a dashboard so why drive your marketing without one?”
Businesses in the UK were estimated to have spent £13.4bn in 2018 advertising through online marketing channels it shows just how important marketing attribution is to the UK economy.
I worked with a business person a number of years ago who used to sell call centre solutions; one of his go-to phrases was “you wouldn’t drive a car without a dashboard, so why drive your business”. I still think about this phrase to this day.
From a digital marketing attribution point of view, so many businesses spend a lot of money to generate awareness, sales leads etc. why would you not want to be able to see each and every touch point they took along the journey to end up in your database?
47% of buyers viewed 3 – 5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep (Demand Gen Report 2016), so which piece of your content is the most important for you and your business. Without full attribution it could be very easy to attribute your marketing budget to the wrong areas.
Why is it so often an afterthought?
Marketing Attribution, is sometimes the last thing people think about when starting a marketing campaign.
The problem is, this is like driving a car without a dashboard.
How do you know if the money you’re spending on marketing is actually turning into leads, sales or phone calls?
If you don’t understand what campaign is driving the sales you won’t be able to make the correct decisions down the line when it comes time to start building the next month or years marketing strategy.
How did your content perform towards your goals?
Which keyword or search phrase contributed most to your overall leads pool?
As John Wanamaker once said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
We now have access to more data than we have ever had, and for some reason some companies are still happy to plough cash into marketing without properly measuring the returns.
Marketing Attribution software
We use a piece of software to help us understand the whole journey.
Ruler Analytics, it’s an analytics platform similar to Google Analytics but will enable you to understand where your form fills are coming from, you can see what the first click was right through to the last click.
Google Analytics is set to default to the last click but think about the journey a prospect now goes on before they make contact.
You want to know where they originally became aware of your website/brand and you can then start to invest more into that particular channel.
Along with knowing where the form fill came from, Ruler also allows you to track where your phone calls come from.
Some of our clients get more phone calls due to the nature of the business they work in, this means that normally there would be no way to understand if the call came from a piece of content, and organic search or a paid advert.
Using the Ruler Analytics call tracking we are able to attribute these sales calls to the right channels and reinvest in those.
By the way, using this for one of our clients who sell photocopiers allowed us to prove that the best leads were coming from our SEO services.
Multiple touch points now lead to a conversion
I today’s connected world the number of devices people can find your website from is incredible.
Add to this that most B2B buyers now look at an average of 12 pieces of content before even making contact with a potential supplier now and you can see how different attribution models can give you very different pictures of where that sale came from.
Make sure you’re not throwing money away on your marketing by upping your attribution game! We can help too, just give us a shout and we can help implement Ruler Analytics in your business.
Sources:
https://www.marketingweek.com/online-ad-market-spend-uk-2020/
https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
https://www.ruleranalytics.com/blog/inbound-marketing/measuring-marketing-performance/