• Blog
  • Oct 18, 2016
  • By Jeff Keenan
Why Marketing Automation Systems Do Not Solve Cross-Channel Attribution

With the continued rise of marketing automation systems for enterprise and smb marketers, folks still face the dilemma of cross-channel attribution.   Implementing a universal tracking pixel based Attribution tool is important to tie all channels together.

What is Marketing Automation

There is an endless amount of automation systems that will do email marketing, serve up ads and more. These platforms are focused on moving leads from top of the marketing funnel through to becoming sales-ready leads. These leads are scored based on their activities and receive targeted content and messaging.  Implementing an automated system increases efficiency and reduces human error all while replacing a high touch, repetitive manual process.  These systems free up marketers to focus on strategic initiatives in hopes to improve conversion rates and revenue.  Inside each of these systems are analytic dashboards that measure certain KPIs such as open rate on emails, click through rates on banner ads or conversion rates on landing pages.  This is all great data and is essential for measurement of your ad-spend with each vendor.

The Dilemma

Here lies the problem, each system only tracks that vendor’s metrics and that’s all they want you to see.  Why would Platform A want to show you how they stack up against Platform B? They wouldn’t and they don’t.  This is where most marketers should start to think about how cross channel attribution would tie everything together.  Cross-channel attribution is the science of using advanced analytics to allocate proportional credit to each marketing touch point across all online and off-line channels, leading to a desired customer action.  What that means is, no matter how many marketing automation systems you’re using, each one needs to be scored and viewed in one (non linear) customer journey.  Think of some systems you’re using now; you only see the results of that system.  If you’re doing any offline advertising such as radio, tv or even phone calls, your email marketing system will not show you results from offline activity.  If you’re doing programmatic trading for display ads, you’re inbound marketing platform will not provide results of display ads.  I think you’re getting the idea and now you’re thinking how do I get all my data in one place and apply attribution models that are specific for my business.

The Answer

Marketers are starting to see the light in marketing attribution platforms.  What was once a very complicated industry mostly used by data scientists is now turning into a more “marketer friendly” industry.  By implementing a universal tracking pixel that tracks all channels including marketing automation systems, Facebook, LinkedIN, TV, Radio, Tradeshow leads and even inbound or outbound phone calls, marketing teams get a holistic view of how their customers interact with their marketing tactics.  This is where LeadsRx excels in helping marketers bring all their conversion data into one easy to use platform.  We track as many campaigns as a marketing team is running.  This saves clients time as they are not poking into multiple dashboards every day to get basic data.