Most marketers know that developing landing pages specific to each ad campaign is a very good idea. By customizing text, calls-to-action, and even imagery and forms to inbound marketing programs, things like conversion rates and quality scores usually go up. Want to optimize your lead gen efforts? Start by optimizing your landing pages. But after that, what do you do next?

“Next” is marketing attribution. Historically a mysterious and dark science, marketing attribution has finally moved into the mainstream and is accessible technology for any marketer. The premise is simple: tell me which marketing campaign is truly driving conversions on my landing pages. We all know about click-through rates, and we all know about conversion rates. But connecting the dots between the two isn’t as obvious.

Marketing attribution platforms track visitors to your website and know exactly where they came from. Maybe someone clicked on a Facebook ad… or maybe they did a search and found you organically. Maybe… they did both. Attribution models give “credit” to the marketing campaigns that appear in the customer’s journey to help you better understand which ones result in conversions, and importantly, which ones do not.

Even if you’re just starting out and not doing very much or any paid advertising, marketing attribution will give you deeper insights into sources of conversions from search, direct visitors, referred visits, and even email click-throughs. Attribution tools can tell you which days of the week are better for conversions and which combination of sources are commonly seen. You can see the effects of seasonality and look at trends over time. Once you start working with attribution, you’ll wonder how you ever optimized your lead gen without it!

Consider adding marketing attribution to your arsenal of tools along with great technologies for building and optimizing landing pages. Getting new customers is hard work… attribution will get you headed in the right direction from the start.