Each time a customer engages with your brand online, you collect data. This data allows you to set digital objectives and assess performance over time.
Digital marketing can be an effective tool that uses this data to help boost sales for businesses. It helps optimize campaigns, establish credibility and gain insight into which your customers are, so read the following article to learn more about this digital relationship.
Attribution Modeling
Attribution modeling provides marketers with insight into how to assign value to various marketing channels for conversions, helping them optimize their budgets and boost return on investment (ROI). But before implementing a model, there are some essential points to take into account when considering this type of service.
First and foremost, having accurate data in your analytics software is essential. Without it, your model will be incomplete and inaccurate, leading to improper attribution of each marketing channel that contributed to conversion.
To accurately credit each of your marketing channels, it is essential that you set up the correct goals and transactions in your analytics software. This means tracking every interaction a user has with your website.
Next, ensure you use unique identifiers for each person who visits your website. For instance, if a lead clicks an ad for your business, use their email address as the main identifier instead of something like a long alphanumeric string. Doing this allows you to associate each interaction and purchase with precisely which lead made it.
Different models exist, each tailored to a certain type of customer. The ideal model will accurately account for each touch point along the customer journey.
Position-based models offer a comprehensive view of a potential customer’s entire buying journey, including all top and bottom of funnel touch points. The Hyros platform can help you see how each touch point contributed to conversion and how the sequence of those touches affected the consumer’s buying decision. This is an invaluable resource that shouldn’t be ignored.
Some of the most popular models include weighted model, algorithmic model and rules-based even distribution model. These models use machine learning to objectively assess how marketing events influence a consumer’s conversion path.
Single-Touch
In today’s complex marketing landscape, with so many channels and paid platforms, it’s essential for marketers to know where their money will yield the greatest return. These models provide this guidance by tracking conversions and reporting them back.
Single-touch attribution is a type of marketing model that gives 100% credit to the initial touch point in a customer journey. This approach works best for businesses with straightforward purchase paths that don’t necessitate many steps to convert sales.
However, if your business has more intricate purchasing journeys, this model can be misleading. Customers don’t always make a purchase immediately after seeing a first touch point, so single-touch attribution doesn’t give an accurate depiction of how a customer’s journey played out.
Multi-touch attribution models employ various methods to assess how a customer’s journey has been affected by various marketing channels. These can range from linear (each touch point gets equal credit), time-decay (more recent touch points receive more weighting than older ones) and U-shaped (U-shaped model assigns 40% credit to the first touch point, 40% to when a lead was created and 20% each subsequent touch point).
Another issue with single-touch attribution is that it neglects micro-touch points. These are the brief interactions that take place between a customer’s initial interaction and final conversion, such as signing up for eBook or downloading information.
Calculating ROI can be challenging, leading to poor optimization decisions. Even though it’s easy to see which ads and campaigns have the greatest effect on sales, marketers may not know how to properly weight these interactions or allocate what percentage each deserves.
Many marketers are turning to customer data platforms (https://www.treasuredata.com/i/the-complete-guide-to-customer-data-platforms/) for help with this problem. CDPs centralize all marketing data in one place and offer robust multi-touch attribution features that allow you to analyze the performance of various channels.
Multi-Touch
Multi-touch attribution is a type of digital marketing sales data that attributes credit to the touch points leading up to customer conversion. It’s an invaluable method for evaluating the worth of each channel and touch point that contributed to a conversion, helping you optimize your strategies across every step of the buyer’s journey.
Multi-touch attribution can be calculated using several models. The most widely used is linear, which gives equal credit to all channels a user engages with before making their purchase. Conversely, time-decay gives more weight to touch points closer to customer conversion.
Marketers can benefit from a U-shaped model, which emphasizes the first touch point and lead creation touch point while giving less credit to the opportunity touch point. This approach works best for B2B brands with clearly defined conversion funnels that track lifecycle stages.
It’s essential to determine which model works best for your business, as each has its own advantages and drawbacks. For instance, linear models tend to work best for B2C brands while time-decay models (which you can read about here) could work better in an e-commerce setting.
Multi-touch models can be highly beneficial for B2B companies, as they allow marketers to track the entire buyer’s journey. This helps them determine which advertising campaigns are successful and which ones need improvement. It gives them insight into which products their customers are most interested in and how best to target those items accordingly.
Many digital marketing sales data tools provide multi-touch modeling systems. Examples include Google Analytics and vendor solutions from Neustar and Nielsen Visual IQ.
Additionally, some tools offer the capability to track offline engagements like phone calls and walk-ins. While these types of marketing tactics may be challenging to measure in other software programs, they are essential elements in creating a successful multi-touch model.
Cross-Channel Attribution
Cross-channel attribution is an invaluable resource for marketers, as it enables them to identify which marketing channels lead to conversions. This insight allows them to more efficiently allocate budgets and campaigns while improving customer experience. Cross-channel attribution helps marketers optimize their mix and focus on channels with the highest return on investment (ROI).
Attribution models assist marketers in determining which marketing channels contributed most to a particular event, such as a sale. They do this by tracking each touch point along the customer journey and assigning credit for each one based on various factors like when it occurred, which channel or campaign it was associated with, and what type of content triggered it.
Different models exist, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. Which model is right for your business depends on what you wish to measure, how to utilize data, and the objectives of your marketing program.
The first-touch model rewards the initial digital asset or website page that led to a conversion, such as a social media post or paid search ad, while this strategy is better and more popular among marketers who have high-performing social media and paid-search campaigns that drive strong results but don’t generate many sales.
Cross-channel attribution models are increasingly popular with marketers as they offer detailed insights into each touch point of the customer journey, enabling them to optimize budget allocation and campaigns accordingly. This helps them identify high-efficiency areas of marketing as well as those which require further development or adjustment.
