Multi-Channel Attribution

Multi-Channel Attribution | The technique of tracking marketing channels that lead to conversions or sales is known as multi-channel attribution, sometimes known as multi-touch attribution.

It's a collection of criteria that allow marketers to assign appropriate values to each marketing channel based on how it affects the sales cycle.

Multi-Channel Attribution

One of the most important advantages of multi-channel attribution is that it allows you to see the success of each touchpoint along the conversion route.

Multi-channel attribution allows you to determine which marketing channels are most effective at generating high-quality leads, allowing you to focus your budget on the areas with the most revenue potential.

Why is multi-channel attribution required?

Multi-channel attribution will provide you a better grasp of what's working and what isn't. Here are a few more advantages of multi-channel attribution for your marketing.

Gives you a unified perspective of your customers' travels.

For marketers, multi-channel attribution has become crucial, especially for those trying to obtain a deeper understanding of the customer journey.

Most, if not all, marketers use digital display, sponsored search, organic social, email, and other methods to generate leads and drive traffic to their company. In fact, 51% of businesses now communicate with clients over at least eight channels.

One of the most useful features of multi-channel attribution is the ability to visualise how users interact with your website and go through the funnel.

Keep track of which channels have the best return on investment. According to a survey, 55 percent of marketers are in charge of increasing ROI and sales.

Multi-Channel Attribution

How to Calculate the Return on Investment in Digital Marketing

Leaders and clients aren't interested in how many leads you've generated; instead, they want to know:

• How many opportunities have been added to the pipeline as a result of marketing?

• Which channels provide the highest value and return on investment?

• Where should the budget be allocated to increase bottom-line activity?

You can evaluate the efficiency of your campaign and determine which touchpoints are most effective in driving conversions and revenue with multi-channel attribution in place.

What are the various attribution models for multi-channel marketing? There has been a surge in attribution models aimed to aid marketers in tracking and analysing customers during their purchase journey.

Marketing attribution models are frameworks for determining how and where your users interact with your marketing channels before converting.

Marketing Attribution Models: What Are They and Why Do They Matter?

There are numerous approaches to choose from when it comes to multi-channel attribution. It's easier to describe the most prevalent attribution models by using an example of a buyer's journey.

1. A random visitor clicks on a Google ad on your website and downloads an eBook.

2. The lead receives a series of emails, clicks a link, and visits your website to learn more about your services.

3. They visit your website two weeks later after conducting a brand search on Google organic.

4. They convert by booking a meeting with your sales team after clicking on a retargeting ad on Facebook.

Attribution models based on a single touch. Single-touch attribution models give a single campaign or channel 100 percent credit. These attribution models often assign conversion values to the first or last channel a visitor interacted with before converting.

Attribution based on the first click. The very first channel that the buyer interacts with receives 100 percent of the credit for a conversion.

We can see from our example that the first-click model has given all of the credit to the Google ad that sparked the sales journey.

Multi-Channel Attribution

Attribution based on the last click

The final channel that the buyer interacts with receives 100 percent of the credit for a conversion.

The most recent non-direct click

We'll have to update our sales journey example to convey this attribution approach. The final channel a buyer interacts with receives 100 percent of the credit for a conversion, ignoring any direct website visits involved in the journey.

For example, the most recent non-direct click model gave the organic visit 100 percent of the credit while ignoring the direct touchpoint.

Attribution models with many touch points

Marketers can better understand the consumer journey with multi-touch attribution. In a nutshell, multi-touch attribution models provide a more accurate picture of how numerous touchpoints in a customer's journey interact to generate leads and conversions.

Attribution model with a straight line

Throughout the whole buying experience, credit for the conversion is spread evenly across each channel a customer interacted with.

The linear attribution model, for example, would distribute all credit for the sale evenly over the whole conversion process.

Multi-channel attribution model with time decay

All marketing touchpoints gain credit from the transaction, but the most recent touchpoints receive a bigger percentage.

For example, the time decay model would credit all touch points equally, with the Facebook ad and organic search receiving more credit.

Attribution model based on position (U-Shaped)

For a conversion, the first and last touch points each receive 40% of the credit. The remaining 20% is distributed evenly among any middle-of-the-journey touchpoints.

The Google ad and Facebook ad each received 40% credit in the position-based approach. The remaining 20% credit is shared among the remaining touchpoints.

When it comes to multi-channel attribution, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and each model has its own set of benefits and drawbacks.

Because they estimate the relevance of your touchpoints differently, each of these attribution models will produce different findings. The type of attribution model you use will be determined by the channels and campaigns you're tracking.

Multi-Channel Attribution

What are some of the most typical obstacles to multi-channel attribution?

For many businesses, marketing attribution is a big barrier. Without the correct approach and tools, attributing conversions to your marketing channels can be challenging.

In fact, just 17 percent of advertisers are believed to consider the success of all of their digital platforms at the same time. Let's take a closer look at some of the major stumbling blocks to successful multi-channel attribution.

Connecting online and offline touchpoints is difficult.

Despite the advancement of modern technology, many consumers continue to choose traditional modes of communication, such as face-to-face and phone interactions, to interact with brands and make important purchasing decisions.

In fact, according to our conversion benchmark data, phone calls in the automotive, dental, legal, and real estate industries frequently exceed web forms in terms of generating new business.

Despite this, marketers lack the tools and functionality necessary to link online and offline touchpoints.

How to Make Your Online and Offline Marketing Work Together

When a buyer enters the offline world to make a phone call, things start to get a little murky. Google Analytics does a great job of tracking the marketing touchpoints that lead to an online conversion, such as a form completion, but when a buyer enters the online world to make a phone call, things start to get a little murky.

Call monitoring is not available in Google Analytics.

So, if your website has a phone number and you're only using Google Analytics, you won't be able to collect data on your leads who convert over the phone.

Related: The Ultimate Guide to Call Tracking

You may use Google Advertisements to track calls and analyse which ads and campaigns are resulting in the most offline conversions by using Google forwarding numbers.

However, importing this data into Google Analytics and correlating offline data with website usage such as sessions, page views, and landing pages is still impossible.

Multi-Channel Attribution

The attribution window for the past is too short.

Google Analytics, for example, only has a 90-day look-back window, which is inconvenient for organisations with long and complicated sales cycles.

What is Google Attribution, why is it important, and how do I get started?

While Google Analytics is considered the go-to tool for marketing measurement by 90% of marketers, it only has a 90-day lookback window.

If you sell a high-value service or product, your sales cycle is likely to be longer than 90 days.

Using a lookback window that is too short for your sales cycle can cause your marketing channels to be undervalued or overvalued.

Do you have any idea what that means? Conversion rates are down, and the cost per acquisition is up.

There is a scarcity of conversion data at the visitor level.

Google Analytics does not give you a single view of your client journeys out of the box.

As a result, it doesn't offer much insight into why your visitors converted on your website.

Related: [SOLUTION] How to track individual visitors in Google Analytics

Most marketers will use goal tracking to track marketing performance.

Setting up Goals in Google Analytics helps you to track conversions and identify which marketing campaigns generate the most new leads.

The problem with this method of measurement is that leads are not sales by definition.

Revenue per lead and lifespan values vary depending on the traffic source, keywords, and ads used.

What is lead source tracking and how can you get started with it?

Just because your Google Ads campaign is bringing in the most conversions doesn't guarantee it's bringing in the most money.

If you solely use conversion objectives, your web analytics will most likely tell you a lot about your website's performance but nothing about its growth.

Where do you begin with multi-channel attribution?

For many marketers, multi-channel attribution is a must-have solution, but without the correct approach and tools, it may be daunting. To get started with multi-channel attribution, follow the three steps below.

Multi-Channel Attribution

1. Identify and track individual website visitors.

Aggregated data is useful for getting a broad picture of how much traffic is coming in and going out of your website.

Although useful, grouping individual users together is unjust because each visitor will be beginning on a unique trip.

Instead, focus on collecting and combining individual data to properly grasp the power of multi-channel attribution.

A detailed guide to website visitor tracking is available here.

Tracking visitors on an individual basis allows you to follow cross-channel journeys and monitor and measure the movements of unique visitors to assist enhance customer experiences and company ROI.

Good attribution software enables marketing, sales, and customer service teams to map every touchpoint a user has across many channels and campaigns before converting into a transaction via the perspective of each attribution model.

Ruler, for example, is a visitor-level multi-channel marketing attribution platform for forms, phone calls, and live chat that documents every step a visitor takes in their trip and links income to the source.

Related: Using Ruler Analytics to see complete customer journeys

Ruler accomplishes this by incorporating JavaScript into your website, allowing you to track which marketing channels a user interacted with across many touchpoints.

2. Use a single platform to store data from multiple sources.

Next, make sure that all of your leads and customer data, as well as the source, are maintained in one place so that you can properly manage every encounter along the sales funnel.

Many businesses use a customer relationship management system (CRM) because it provides stakeholders with immediate access to critical information about opportunities and revenue.

In addition, most CRMs allow you to customise fields, which is useful for tracking lead sources and marketing variables.

Using your CRM to collect data from numerous marketing sources gives you a single source of truth and allows you to see which channels generate the most quality leads and revenues.

Despite its seeming simplicity, tracking lead source in your CRM and making sense of it all can be difficult if you don't have the correct processes in place.

You may match leads with their marketing touchpoints and instantly transfer this data to your CRM using an attribution solution like Ruler.

You may feed conversion and marketing data into your sales team's system, allowing them to learn more about each prospect before contacting them.

3. Integrate multi-channel data into the tools you use on a daily basis to show your influence.

After you've gained a lead, you'll need to figure out how to link your lead source and revenue data to other programmes so that your company's leaders can see the impact of your marketing efforts.

At Ruler Analytics, for example, we utilise ChartMogul, our platform and revenue management system, to measure and report on revenue generated by our marketing efforts.

We've put up custom fields in ChartMogul, and marketing source data from our attribution system and CRM is pushed through so we can see more than just which campaigns generate the most leads.

ChartMogul also has a direct connection to our payment processor.

As a result, the income we generate from each customer is assigned to all of the data we have each month, allowing us to follow and report on subsequent transactions.

This integration has given us access to a whole new realm of possibilities, allowing us to:

• Calculate the average lifespan value of various business sectors and kinds.

• Determine which marketing channels generate the most lifetime revenue.

• Keep track of how our sales incentives are affecting our results.

• Demonstrate the precise impact of our marketing on our bottom-line activity.

• We can see so much more than which campaigns get us the most "conversions" when our marketing and sales data is fed into ChartMogul.

More significantly, we can precisely attribute revenue across the customer experience with the help of Ruler Analytics, and allocate budget to the areas that have the highest influence on ROI.

Multi-Channel Attribution

Related: Ruler's Revenue Attribution Methodology

Do you need assistance with multi-channel attribution tracking?

Marketers who are spending money to create income should have a system in place to determine whether their channels are providing genuine value.

When you understand the advantages and limitations of various attribution models and have a system in place to gather and filter performance data, you can utilise it to optimise your campaigns, decrease waste, and demonstrate how your efforts are generating income for your company.

Are you interested in learning more about multi-channel attribution? Make an appointment with one of our sales representatives to begin focusing on the income effect of your marketing efforts.