While the marketing ecosystem continues to evolve at a dramatic pace, the crux of every business remains unchanged. That is, to improve satisfaction across the customer journey. The art and science of Marketing Attribution exemplifies this objective.
With customer analytics coming from multiple channels across multiple devices, finding the exact impact of each interaction on your objectives is tricky. However, getting marketing attribution right provides a bird’s eye view on how well your marketing stack is operating. This V3media primer on marketing attribution looks at the fundamental parts of various attribution models and sets out the approaches, opportunities and challenges facing digital marketers.
Marketing Attribution: The Core Definition
Marketing Attribution is defined as the process of attributing the source and their outcomes in terms of ROI of conversions across multiple campaigns at different customer touch-points. Before getting started with attribution, marketers need to identify these touch points. Each touch point will have its marketing attribution model. These models determine how the organization endorses leads generated from campaign touch points.
The Marketing Attribution Ladder
Marketing attribution needs to account for the customer journey from start to end. A single customer may have multiple footprints across campaigns on many devices and platforms. Marketers need to identify each of those interactions to effectively measure ROI in each campaign. To do so, marketers need to familiarize with various elements of the attribution ladder.
Touch Points
“Your brand is a story unfolding across all customer touch points.” – Jonah Sachs, CEO of Free Range Studios
A touch point is your business acting as a direct contact between the customer and the brand that helps build a perception or an opinion about the business. Designed to help customers make a more informed decision about the business, touch points influences the consumer behavior at various levels—pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase. In short, touch points help build a strong brand image in a competitive marketplace by retaining more customers.
Campaigns
Marketing campaigns carry a centralized message delivered through different marketing channels to communicate the idea to customers. Marketing attribution revolves around measuring the success of a campaign by attributing each touch point. Each rung in the marketing attribution ladder is interdependent and hence needs to be benchmarked during credit attribution.