Today’s marketing professionals have access to all kinds of advanced technology to help them hone their strategies, from web analytics to social listening. If you’re a tech enthusiast, chances are you have a head start on understanding such tools, but it’s always worth refreshing your skills or learning new ones. Today, we’re going to explore marketing attribution.
Enhancing your marketing attribution skill set means you’ll be able to improve marketing campaigns, make data-driven decisions, and grow your business. Let’s take a closer look.
What is Marketing Attribution?
Marketing attribution is the practice of analyzing data to figure out which touchpoints and marketing activities have led to a sale or conversion. This data can come from various places, including email, social media, offline events, search engines, and websites.
Some refer to it as an analytical science—and rightfully so, as analytics is at the core of marketing attribution. The practice looks at how a customer has interacted with your channels and messaging as well as which ones led them to take a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product.
But why do it? In short, because it shows you what affects a customer's decision and what makes a successful interaction.
Essentially, it makes it easier for marketing teams to drill into consumer behavior to better understand what makes them tick. And when you gain a better picture of where, how, and when consumers engage with your messaging, you can improve every campaign in the future.
That said, it’s not only about creating more relevant marketing strategies as you can also share behavioral data with tech experts, such as product designers and web developers. Then, they can create more effective tools and make sure solutions meet customer needs.
Key Components of Marketing Attribution
Understanding the key components of marketing attribution means you can measure the effectiveness of various marketing channels more accurately. Here some of the main aspects that it’s worth getting to grips with:
Touchpoints
A touchpoint is any place where customers can interact with your brand, including opening emails, clicking on ads, visiting websites, contacting the call center, and engaging on social media.
Conversion
A conversion means a customer completes an action that you wanted them to take, such as signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or downloading a demo.
Attribution Models
Naturally, you need to know which touchpoint or channel was responsible for a conversion, so attribution models and frameworks allow you to allocate value or “credit” where it’s due. There are a few common models for doing this:
First-touch attribution: The initial customer interaction gets all the credit, and is often used to improve lead generation or website forms.
Last-touch attribution: All the credit is given to the final touchpoint before conversion.
Linear attribution: All customer touchpoints get equal credit, giving you a wider perspective of customer interactions.
Lead-conversion touch attribution: This credits the touchpoint that actually created the lead. For example, if you created a popup using Javascript, you could find out how it performed in terms of driving leads to sales or signups.
U-shaped attribution: Sometimes referred to as position-based attribution, this is the most advanced model. It puts 40% of the credit on the first and last points of contact (the last being the one just before conversion), and bundles all other touchpoints together to make up the remaining 20%.
The Importance of Marketing Attribution
While marketing attribution benefits both marketers and tech enthusiasts, it’s certainly useful to understand what marketing attribution can do for you if you work in tech:
Identify which marketing efforts and tools are effective
Use customer data to improve marketing campaigns with appealing content and tailored messaging
Optimize your marketing spend, increase conversions, and boost ROI.
Improve product development
There are even more benefits if you incorporate marketing attribution KPIs into your integrated business planning.
What is integrated business planning? It’s a strategy that combines numbers from different business activities. As it requires collaboration, tech teams can contribute data from the marketing attribution process to help the business grow overall. So, the benefits are certainly widespread.
Enhancing Marketing Attribution Skills As a Tech Enthusiast
Hopefully, we’ve convinced you of the myriad things marketing attribution can do for you. Now, let’s look at how you can enhance your marketing attribution skills as a tech enthusiast to widen your experience and explore new career options in both tech and marketing.
Learn the Basics of Marketing Attribution
It’s good to start with the fundamental concepts of marketing attribution, so familiarize yourself with conversion paths, touchpoints, and the different attribution models. Make sure you understand marketing funnels to learn about the various stages, including awareness, conversions, and consideration.
Once you have the knowledge you need to understand data from marketing attribution, you’ll be in a better position to develop and use technology to support marketing goals.
Become Hands-on With Analytical Tools
We have access to countless analytics tools today, and they’re incredibly effective. Just look at Google Analytics, one of the most widely used tools for marketing attribution. It’s fairly easy to use multi-channel funnel reports and track conversions, so take time to learn how to use it for these purposes.
It’s also worth exploring attribution-specific tools, such as Adobe Analytics, as they are designed for marketing attribution.
Keep in mind that each tool has a different set of features that will broaden your understanding of marketing attribution.
Develop Data Analytics Skills
As we’ve discussed, marketing attribution includes analyzing vast amounts of data to determine which marketing efforts are most effective. When you develop analytical skills needed to do this, you can apply those skills to create and strengthen marketing tools.
If you’re a tech enthusiast, you may be able to develop or improve analytics platforms that can accurately report and track marketing attribution. What does that look like? It could involve creating dashboards or tools to show conversions. EIther way, investing in marketing attribution tools will allow you to practice tracking customer touchpoints and conversion rates to make serious improvements.
Work With Marketing Teams
Collaboration is everything for modern businesses. Collaborating on projects between marketing and tech teams mean you can gain an understanding of real-time challenges and support the marketing team to develop proper solutions.
Although marketing attribution differs for marketers and tech experts, everyone can (and should) work together if you want to get the best results. This might mean you create collaborative tools that reinforce this collaboration, whether that’s real-time reporting, collaborative analytic platforms, or shared dashboards.
A tech expert may not be responsible for analyzing all the data from marketing attribution, but they can play a key role in providing training and ongoing support to marketers. This may involve interpreting data and training them on how to use attribution tools.
If you want to strengthen your relationships even more, consider getting a marketing mentor. Look for someone who has experience in marketing attribution as they can offer guidance and provide more collaborative opportunities.
Work On Projects
Nothing beats hands-on experience in the real world. If you want to put your marketing attribution skills into practice, work on real projects or dive into case studies. A great place to start is by reading case studies of companies that have successfully used attribution models, and learning from their successes and outcomes.
Once you’ve done this, you can work on your own projects, such as a personal blog or a small business. Use these as a practical way to analyze marketing campaigns, track data, and learn how to target your TAM (total addressable market).
Continuously Build On Your Knowledge
Just like any skill set, you need to keep building your knowledge. As we mentioned, there are countless tools and platforms out there, but it’s a good idea to join the Google Analytics Academy and look at the attribution modules. Then, search for other online learning tools, such as Ironhack, which provide resources and training on relevant topics like marketing analytics and attribution.
It’s also important to stay updated with industry trends, which you can do by following specific blogs and publications and joining professional communities.
You can also grow your knowledge by keeping up to date with industry reports, which can give you insight into future trends and the current state of marketing attribution.
Drive Innovation
As a techie, you’ll know how important tests are. Marketing attribution skills give you the ability to run experiments like A/B testing to figure out which marketing efforts are the most effective.
That means you can help marketing teams to improve their strategies and find new ways to grow, whether that’s surpassing KPIs or developing entirely new and innovative campaigns. It’s also about staying ahead of the competition as you can explore and implement advanced attribution methods like:
Algorithmic attribution: Use data-driven algorithms to give credit to the various touchpoints with models that change based on new data.
AI and machine learning: Build more sophisticated attribution models that work in real time and can predict customer behavior.
Key Takeaways
Just like anything, enhancing your marketing attribution skills as a tech enthusiast means building up your knowledge and practical experiences. When you get to grips with the basics of marketing attribution, become familiar with analytics tools, stay up-to-date with industry trends, and understand how to support marketing teams, you can build a strong connection between marketing and technology.
It’s all about balance. Marketers and tech experts need each other to build the most successful marketing strategies, so take time to develop your marketing attribution skills and you’ll stand out as a team player who can have a positive impact.
Author Bio:
Lucas Rossi - Growth Marketing Manager
Lucas Rossi is a Growth Marketing Manager at Dealfront, the go-to platform for giving sales and marketing teams the data to close deals in Europe. Lucas plays a key role in refining Dealfront’s data-driven approach to decision-making, leading to better lead quality and sales results. Lucas’ approach has advanced Dealfront’s marketing position and put it at the forefront of growth marketing.
