Good attribution tools help you measure a plethora of touchpoints, all the way down the funnel. You’ll finally be able to make customer acquisition a streamlined, enterprise-wide activity. It’s what your CEO has always dreamed of.  

When attribution is a gimmick, and when it’s so much more

Here’s an important question: is marketing attribution just a technological gimmick, or is it something more? When you’re doing attribution right, it certainly is very powerful, and more than a gimmick. The trouble is, many would consider measuring the performance of a single button on a website to be “marketing attribution.” But it isn’t.

When first time marketers get into contact with marketing attribution, it’s usually because a geeky colleague has found “this new measurement toy” and is fiddling around with it in the evening hours.  

Often, such reconnaissance sessions start with measuring the effectiveness of a single touchpoint, like a shouty CTA-button or number of direct mails opened. But that is not what attribution is about. “Emails opened” is just a single counter on a less-than-informative metric, which can only be considered a technological gimmick, not attribution.

Instead, the goal of marketing attribution is to get a complete overview of marketing effectiveness, online and offline, across channels and devices, all the way down the funnel, following the complete customer journey.

By gathering as much attribution data as possible and analyzing it, you can start to discover causal relationships between marketing activities and commercial results. Both marketers and C-suite strategists can then adjust their actions to reliably improve commercial results over time.

How do we distinguish between high quality marketing attribution and just “putting a meter on a button?” With so many marketers still mistaking one for the other, it’s time to explain the difference once and for all. Understanding the difference will open doors for a more holistic view on attribution to enable enterprise customer acquisition.

The point and pointlessness of single-point solutions

There are plenty of tools available that focus on measuring one single channel. And most of those are quite popular as well. Think about solutions like AnalyticOwl, Marchex, Sizmek

AdRoll, or Facebook’s popular conversion pixel. Do any of those ring a bell?

As single point attribution tools, they do the job. They’ll tell you how your radio spots perform, or how your Facebook ads convert, or how convincing your calls are. Great start!

The strategic value of full-funnel marketing attribution

The truth is, perfect 100% attribution is not possible. Any sensory experience can influence a potential buyer and tip him over the edge, to make him pull out his wallet. You see a guy across the street wearing a shirt with Nike logo on it. Or you’re driving past a field of black and white cows that somehow reminds you of a nicely chilled can of Red Bull. There’s no way to include all of that in your customer and lead attribution model.

With attribution, you can never be certain. But you can certainly do better than single-point attribution. In fact, it’s surprisingly easy to make attribution surpass the stage of a marketing gimmick, and to gather the information needed to improve strategic, enterprise wide decisions.

Attribution tools that measure up to 90% of the entire customer journey can help you bridge the gaps between silos. They can give you insight into how customers build a relationship with your brand over the span of a month or even a year, across all channels and devices.  

A full funnel B2B marketing attribution tool can provide useful data for almost all departments, not just marketing. It will turn customer acquisition from an activity that only concerns Sales, to an enterprise wide activity. Your attribution tool can become the only reliable bridge between the brand and the customer.

What usually starts with a single marketer fiddling around with his new attribution toy can quickly become the backbone of enterprise-wide strategic decisions. It can give you clarity about why customers behave like they do, and what you should do to create an ever stronger bond with them over time. That is what real marketing attribution is about. And it will surely get your CEO interested.

The first step to measuring the full customer journey

A little attribution is always better than no attribution, and experimenting with attribution can never hurt. But when you’re trying a new tool, you may as well try one that anticipates future growth. You need to be able to scale up when your CEO walks in and wants more.

LeadsRx measures it all, providing executives the strategic insight they’ve always wanted.