Customer journeys are never just about getting from awareness to buying. It usually consists of multiple touchpoints and engagements with your different marketing channels. This multi-touch buying experience poses difficult questions for marketers. Which channels contribute to an eventual conversion? How much did each channel contribute? Enters B2B marketing attribution in this equation of channel and activity effectiveness.
When is b2b marketing attribution needed?
Smaller companies develop through referrals and other non-digital marketing methods. So, marketing attribution and analytics isn’t a major factor for them. Eventually, though, they have to bring in the digital channels. The shift isn’t easy, and many problems occur when revenue attribution and analytics aren’t set up properly. It is just like throwing darts blindly. You will never know if you hit the target or not.
Larger organizations will have monitoring in place. They struggle with keeping attribution organized and assigning the right metrics for success.
As a result, marketing teams are left in situations where they do not understand the customer journey and touchpoints. All of their marketing strategies are based on surface-level data and guesswork.
To begin with B2B marketing attribution, you must understand it first.
Understanding B2B marketing attribution
Marketing attribution allows you to evaluate how effectively particular channels work. It gives insight into how each touchpoint connects to the marketing ROI. Most crucially, it provides actionable data for critical decisions.
B2B channel attribution gives you a more comprehensive way to trace your customers’ journey and credit marketing campaigns that helped them along the way. B2B revenue attribution helps redefine marketing as an investment rather than a cost center, but that isn’t easy to achieve without the necessary models and tools.
There is no such thing as a perfect B2B marketing attribution model. Every engagement is difficult to predict and measure since a customer journey in B2B is never linear but a succession of activities and touchpoints. However, these different types of b2b marketing attribution models work well in the industry.
Types of B2B marketing attribution models
B2B Marketing Attribution has blown up. The reason is the onus for B2B organizations to provide the best customer experience to retain customers. This optimization can only be achieved through proper attribution of channels. This has given rise to multiple attribution models, which we will cover below.
Marketing attribution models are frameworks that precisely track interaction touchpoints of customers with your marketing channels.
- Single-touch attribution: This sort of attribution gives a single campaign or channel 100% of the revenue credit. These attribution models often assign conversion numbers to the first or final touchpoint a visitor interacted with before converting.
- On the other hand, multi-touch attribution allows marketers to examine the full conversion journey with greater precision. The goal of multi-touch attribution is to maximize the use of your marketing spend by focusing on the channels that have the greatest impact on conversions and revenue.
Examples of these marketing attribution models are:
Last click
The term “last-click attribution” is a web analytics methodology in which the “last click” is credited with a conversion or sale. Your CRM or Google Analytics uses this as a default attribution model. This falls under single-touch attribution.
Time Decay
It is a multi-touch attribution approach that gives credit to each ‘touchpoint’ but favors the last-touch point.
Linear
Linear attribution allocates credit for conversion evenly across all interactions in a linear fashion. It is another example of multi-channel attribution.
Position-based
Gives 40% to the first and last touchpoint, then evenly distributes the remaining 20% across the other touchpoints.
First Click
This model gives the first channel a user clicked through 100% of the credit for a lead or conversion.
Getting started with B2B marketing attribution
Many people talk about how important it is to make data-driven decisions. Still, without adequate analytics and B2B channel attribution in place, the best you can do is make judgments based on a portion of the data — but the bigger picture will remain a mystery.
Longer sales cycles need a more granular perspective of the steps consumers take on their way to converting; therefore, having this data is especially crucial for B2B organizations.
You can better evaluate how various channels and campaigns work with one another through Google Analytics. You will get a cross-channel funnel view that will help your b2b marketing attribution by setting up conversion goals to track when contact information is exchanged. This will assist you in making more informed budgeting decisions that will result in better ROI.
