In today’s digital world, brands must continuously innovate their marketing campaigns and consider various channels. After all, where would any business be without the ability to see how well its advertising efforts are performing? The key is to use marketing attribution in conjunction with your CRM campaign tracking to maximize return on ad spend and efficiency.

Getting the attention of your target market is only half the battle. The rest of the equation involves knowing exactly where your audience members are being influenced and which engagements are contributing the most during the buying journey. The use of customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns helps you track performance and, in turn, helps you make informed marketing decisions.

Is CRM campaign tracking a real thing? It is, but encouraging marketers to use it and explaining how it works with marketing attribution requires a bit of explanation.

What is Campaign Tracking?

Campaign tracking, using a CRM solution, refers to tracking numerous pieces of information about a marketing initiative, such as an event, email, or social media message. The primary function of CRM is to track and compile information related to prospect and customer activities. In essence, monitoring activity within a CRM solution can hold every campaign element across multiples channels and applications.

CRM campaign tracking can leverage leads and contacts beyond general information gathering. It allows better visibility that will result in the success of both single and multiple-channel campaigns, leading to accurately tracking prospect and customer activity and which of those activities eventually led to a sale.

Why Is Campaign Tracking Important?

Simply put, without the presence of campaign tracking, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to track the fullness of your campaigns accurately. Without accuracy, it becomes more challenging to determine if your implemented campaigns are working effectively and to know if your money is being spent wisely.

It’s only through the use of campaign tracking that you’ll be able to see how your marketing initiatives have impacted the business. Without campaign tracking, it’s more likely your campaigns will culminate in a pile of leads without really understanding where they may have come from and whether other engagements with your company had a role to play.

How CRM Campaign Tracking Could Benefit a Business

Anyone who has ever been in business knows that marketing is the answer to increasing sales. Although research and development are of great importance, many in your target audience would not buy from you without marketing. Because marketing campaigns require constant management, it only makes sense to track them to ensure that it’s not merely costing you money. Tracking is a critical component of any marketing campaign, and here are some other reasons why:

• With campaign tracking, you can combine marketing activities with your sales pipeline to get a clearer picture of how well your campaigns and sales strategies are working for you and your brand.
• CRM tracking helps you figure out whether your various marketing methods are effective and if each one has influenced the other.
• Sales funnels are a standard in any lead generation and lead conversion process; tracking allows you to measure your mid-funnel activities side by side with marketing attributions.
• Posting content to generate leads is standard practice, but how well is it working for your business? Tracking helps you measure its efficacy.
• You can use the contact records to inform your sales team of any vital activities related to your marketing campaigns.
• See how well your online and offline activities are doing and how they interact with each other.
• CRM tracking helps provide a more comprehensive ROI reporting.

CRM campaign tracking can work very well with attribution modeling. The data within your CRM can be tracked through one of the seven attribution models. This practice will allow you to identify which campaign channel is most valuable at bringing a customer to conversion.

For instance, LeadsRx integrates with Salesforce to help enterprises not only track what marketing efforts are creating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) but, more importantly, what marketing efforts are helping close more deals in the pipeline.

What Are the 7 Attribution Models?

An attribution model is an approach that helps determine how engagements between prospects and a brand are weighted in relation to which of the engagements contributed to the sale. LeadsRx offers a 2020 marketing attribution guide to marketing pros intent on learning all there is to know about attribution. For the purposes of this piece, we cover seven different types of marketing attribution:

Last interaction

This attribution model assigns all the credit for a sale to a customer’s last engagement before the buying decision. For example, a user sees an ad on Facebook and clicks on it to learn more but doesn’t buy. Several days later, the user comes across the same ad, but this time, it’s on Twitter. During this engagement, the person decides to purchase. The Twitter ad receives full credit for the sale.

First interaction

This approach gives all of the credit to the first interaction that introduced the product or service. Using the previous case described, this model will assign all the conversion credit to Facebook.

Last non-direct click

As with the previous two models, this model awards the credit to one interaction. In this model, the last interaction is credited for the sale, but only if it’s not a case where the buyer types the URL directly into the browser in order to make the purchase. An example of this would be someone clicking a Facebook ad and then visiting the website the next day. Under this model, the Facebook ad receives the credit for the conversion.

Linear attribution

This model evenly divides the credit across every engagement a customer had before the conversion. If there were four interactions, each interaction would receive 25% of the credit for the conversion.

Time decay attribution

Going a step further than the linear attribution approach, this model adds greater weight to engagements that occur closest to the conversion.

U-shaped attribution

This model gives 40% to the first interaction, 40% to the last interaction, and 20% is divided evenly across all remaining interactions.

Data-driven attribution

The data-driven approach includes components indicative of other models, but the weight assigned to each interaction can be different, as they are determined based on the company’s unique situation and sales model. There is no standard configuration for this model, as it could be different from company to company and from campaign to campaign.

The use of marketing attribution, and the models associated with it, deliver keen insight to marketers and the brand they work for. To see everything you need to know about multi-touch attribution, there are a number of online resources that shed light on the practice.

Key Takeaway

CRM and marketing attribution isn’t something to ignore. Using both and having them work in unison can be the silver bullet that sets you apart from your competitors.