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What Is Digital Marketing Attribution & Why It Is Important to B2B Business?

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Short Summary: Digital marketing attribution reporting will allow you to understand which marketing strategies can bring the desired results and which areas need to be improved. Find out how to do marketing attribution correctly in this post.

 

The beauty of today’s marketing environment is that there are more channels that marketers can use to engage customers. The customer’s buying journey is not linear, so it is a given that sales happen after a series of touchpoints. What this scenario presents is several engagement opportunities to convince leads to convert.

These opportunities, however, also come with a lot of challenges. The more you have channels to market your business, the more it becomes confusing to identify which one truly helps you. The customer journey is so complex that you must be inclined across different channels to ensure visibility. It becomes a burden to marketers in terms of their budget since it can be expensive to implement several marketing strategies simultaneously.

Counting web traffic, click-throughs, and open email rates are never enough to predict if a campaign is successful or not. Marketers have to understand why sales happen to execute the best marketing strategy. Digital marketing attribution is the essential tool to do this. With an efficient b2b marketing attribution, you can determine whether you promote on proper channels and if you spend your marketing budget wisely.

A simple report, however, will not do. In this post, you will learn about b2b attribution reporting, why it is essential, and how to effectively use it for your business.

What Are Attribution Reports

Google Analytics is the standard tool for marketers. But instead of getting excited with the sections on attribution, they usually go for the Keyword Planner and Ad Preview tools. Yes, they are helpful, but you need more than those tools to understand your marketing efforts better.

With attribution, you can determine all conversion events with every sale. It will highlight which source and ad network or channels drive the most conversion. In short, attribution tools measure the conversion path from being led down to why they decide to become customers.

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Therefore, attribution reports are the data marketers can use to quantify the contribution of each traffic source in conversions and sales. It holds the key to opening a plethora of information about the whole picture of the customer journey and the marketing strategies you put up. With these reports, marketers will have the opportunity to make informed decisions. It will guide them with their marketing budget allocations. For companies just starting, digital marketing attribution will help prioritize only those channels that are sure to boost conversions.

Dissecting Attribution Reports

To further enrich your knowledge about attribution, take a moment to study the different aspects of attribution reporting and learn what you should look out for:

  1. Attribution Overview – Attribution reveals a lot of fascinating data about your marketing. An attribution overview is like a summary of the whole attribution report. It contains basic data about the number of conversions you gained in a specific period. The number of ad impressions before converting can also be derived from it.
  2. Assisted Conversions – An attribution report may also show the conversions that result from your advertising. It helps identify keywords that are working.
  3. Cross-device Activity – This marketing era is now ultra-connected and multi-platform. This means that customers can interact with the company on different devices. Attribution reports can give you thorough information about which devices customers use most when conversions happen. This will allow you to adjust your campaigns accordingly. For example, if your customers primarily buy from their mobile devices, you must focus on improving your mobile campaigns to boost ROI. 
  4. Top Paths – Attribution reports will also show customers’ paths on their journey. This will help you decide the attribution model you might want to use for your attribution activities.

When you have robust digital marketing attribution software, you can adjust the filters to give reports on the data that you need the most. Other information you might want to check to see the marketing impact on conversions are the bounce rates, average session lengths, and new visitors, among many others.

How Do Attribution Reports Help Your Business?

Dealing with a lot of data can be daunting, especially if you start with b2b attribution. The only way to streamline your approach is to have attribution reports.

Instead of swimming in a sea of information, you can rely on an attribution report that can generate the essential marketing metrics. You do not need to analyze more than the data you truly need to assess when making optimized decisions. A standardized approach will avoid jumping in and trying to analyze everything.

Essentially, attribution reports can give you answers to the following questions:

  1. How long will it take for a customer to convert? Knowing how long it will take for a customer to complete the buying journey is helpful if you want to optimize conversion rates and refine your strategy simultaneously. An attribution report is valuable because it shows the number of steps a customer has to take before getting convinced to make a purchase. It will highlight which areas of the paths need to be improved to make the conversion process more efficient.
  2. How often do customers switch between devices on the conversion path? When conducting an in-depth analysis of the attribution reports, you can see that some customers like to switch between devices before making a purchase. Knowing the details of this customer behavior will help you plan your strategies well. You can see which channels have to be improved to encourage more engagement. This would allow you to boost your campaign right at that point when users interact the most with their chosen device to convert.
  3. Which marketing channels deliver the most leads? A detailed attribution report shows which channels are most productive in generating leads. The statistical information will reveal the various paths that customers take to convert. It will also show a breakdown of the different channels in your marketing, like paid ads, social media, and email marketing. The result will determine which channels customers prefer and are most comfortable using when interacting with your company. It will then guide you in designing future marketing strategies and where to put your investments.
  4. How many leads does your blog generate? A blog is one of the most potent marketing weapons, but it would take a lot of resources to monitor. This is where attribution reports become handy. It will show data-driven information about your blog’s effectiveness in generating leads and driving conversions.
  5. Which pages or channels are viewed the most prior to conversions? Many types of pages will help convert leads to customers. It will be fantastic to have a clear idea of whether to use blog posts, special offers, or landing pages to boost your ROI. An attribution report gives you an idea of which marketing pages attract a lot of attention and contribute to conversions.

As you can see, there is more detailed information that attribution reports can provide you than basic analytics.

How to Get Started with Attribution Reporting

It can be daunting to start generating attribution reports. Good thing that most b2b attribution software automatically runs their reports. You can also program the automation so that the attribution tool will report only the specific data you need.

Attribution reporting is a strategy that will show the impact of the marketing effort you implement. It summarizes the key points of data that lets you identify which path the customer took that made the highest impact on your ROI. Attribution reporting will be based on the different attribution models you choose for attribution, such as the following:

  1. First-touch attribution model- The attribution report on this type of attribution model will focus on the first interaction during the campaign. The data you get from the report will be helpful if you are trying to raise brand awareness.
  2. Last-touch attribution model- A lot similar to the first-touch model, the attribution report for the last-touch attribution model will show the details of the last interaction before conversion.
  3. Linear attribution model- The attribution report for the linear attribution model will reveal information about all interactions in the sales funnel.
  4. U-shaped attribution model- Since the U-shaped attribution model credits 80% evenly between the first and last interaction and 20% on the interactions in between, the attribution reports will also focus on everything that happens from the start of the customer journey to the end.

The first-touch and last-touch attribution models are under the single-touch attribution model category. In contrast, Linear and U-shaped attribution models belong in the multi-touch attribution model category. There are more models in the multi-touch attribution, like time-decay, W-shaped, and Full-path.

Although the approach may differ for each attribution model, attribution reporting is similar in that it offers transparency in the marketing strategies. It rolls out relevant information you can use to understand whether your strategy is a success or a failure. The reports can also be generated in a lot of ways, but the main point of it is to reveal the areas that the marketing team has to put a lot of focus on.

Choosing the Right Attribution Reporting Tools

The most crucial factor in digital marketing attribution is the accuracy of the insights from the reports. Get the most reliable insights using the right attribution software for your online and offline campaigns.

You will need more than an analytics platform to provide exceptional campaign insights. To evaluate a marketing attribution tool, you must check for its speed, accuracy, connection performance, and ability to provide cross-channel marketing insights.  

To help you choose the best attribution reporting tool, it must meet the following criteria:

  1. Can explain how the modeling formula functions. The attribution model is the math involved in analyzing the raw data from attribution reports. The software must demonstrate that its formula for treating marketing data is effective. Do not forget that everything will crumble if you start wrong in your attribution method. It would help if you had accurate analytics to get precise attribution. You can only optimize your methods if you get everything right, from data gathering to analysis.
  2. Specializes in key insights. A good marketing attribution software can provide unique insights that appeal to marketers. It can be that the tool has a feature that measures mobile impact.  It must have an area of specialty that will be a valuable solution for the marketing team’s needs.
  3. Can provide granular insights. One of the purposes of marketing attribution is to personalize the customer experience on the sales funnel. This can be achieved if your attribution software can provide granular insights that will allow you to design highly-specific and targeted campaigns.
  4. Uses consumer data to leverage insights. You can only have the best insights into specific marketing metrics if your software accesses various consumer data. A broad scope of information about the customer and the marketing paths will help generate the analytics you need for campaign optimization.
  5. Must take branding into account. Branding efforts also contribute to the success of marketing strategies. A marketing attribution software should do more than gather and analyze data. It must also provide insightful information about how brand authority has a role in facilitating ROI.

Considering these criteria, you will be assured to have a digital marketing attribution tool that can assist you in understanding the marketing strategy as a whole. It will help you achieve a cohesive approach that will deliver granular and person-level insights about the campaign’s effectiveness from all channels and resources.

Conclusion

Attribution is not a new concept in marketing. Although most marketers are already using it, the methods are constantly changing. This post shows that attribution reports can be valuable to your marketing strategy. Without attribution reporting, you will probably find it challenging to optimize your efforts in increasing revenue and scaling your business.

By successfully implementing digital marketing attribution with robust reporting, you can make better marketing decisions, and you will be able to enjoy the fruits of your marketing labor as leads turn to conversions.

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Author’s Bio

Jenn Pereira is a full-time marketing consultant and growth hacker who works for huge startups like Removal.AI, DesignStripe and DreamData. Currently, the co-founder of SaaSLaunchr.com – a full-stack SaaS marketing agency

She creates custom strategies for various clients to provide organic traffic growth and to streamline their revenue pipeline through effective SEO and content marketing. 

 

Kossi Adzo is the editor and author of Startup.info. He is software engineer. Innovation, Businesses and companies are his passion. He filled several patents in IT & Communication technologies. He manages the technical operations at Startup.info.

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