Introduction to the Marketing Attribution Challenge

One of the main responsibilities of your marketing team is determining which campaigns are the best campaigns. This is no small feat. Even with the seemingly infinite amount of data spilling from your Salesforce instance, even with the growing number of available marketing enablement technologies, marketers are struggling to prove out their revenue impact. 

A customer’s journey is complex; it’s made up of multiple campaigns, accessed through multiple devices, and viewed by multiple people from the same company. All this swirling data leaves marketers asking:

  • What campaigns have the most influence?
  • What Account Contact accessed the campaign?
  • When? Was it once, or were there multiple revisits?
  • Were there any other activities that influenced the booking?

Unfortunately, these simple questions aren’t easily answered. 

CRMs make it difficult to attribute campaigns, dates, and contacts to an opportunity. If you want all your campaigns, dates, and contacts linked to the correct opportunity, marketers must rely heavily on their sales team and trust that their reps log every contact, correctly define each contact role, and appropriately identify the primary campaign source. That’s a lot to ask of a team that wants to spend their time closing business instead of digging through your CRM!

Now, if you’re a Salesforce user (like us!) there’s an added complication. Salesforce only looks at out-of-the-box campaigns, meaning you aren’t able to see how a prospect accessed the campaign in question. A prospect can access a campaign in a number of ways. Organically through your website, a Google search (Adwords), a post on a free social channel, a paid social ad, maybe through a chat pop-up, or maybe via an email promotion, among others. It’s a lot! 

The best way to uncover the campaign channel and develop a clear picture of how a prospect interacts with your brand is to measure your source, mediums, and any additional information using Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters. But, as you probably have guessed, there are limitations. Even when you are able to capture source, medium, and campaign, Salesforce’s attribution view is limited to either all campaign touches or to just the primary campaign. Sure, there are ways you can add UTM parameters at the campaign member level, but reporting at the member level is complex, time-consuming, and a blog topic for another time. 

Tracking campaign attribution sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? No matter where you turn, no matter how many alternative routes you choose in hopes of making some sort of sense of your customer’s journey, you’re met with yet another Salesforce obstacle. But there’s a reason marketers put in so much effort to measure attribution. Not only can your attribution model prove out marketing’s correlation to revenue growth, but it can help you analyze campaigns by channel, align marketing and sales teams, uncover where you can consolidate resources, maybe find reason to obtain additional budget, and then define an attribution strategy. 

In short, having a solid attribution model in place helps measure the ROI of your marketing programs to make impactful decisions on future campaigns and spend.

For this blog series, we want to focus solely on marketing campaign attribution. Determining the right attribution model for your company is the first step in uncovering the impact of your marketing effort. We want to help you understand what campaign yields the best ROI and at what stage in the customer journey. Knowing the answers to these questions will ultimately help you decide where to allocate marketing resources and plan your team’s next step. 

Read on to learn about the many marketing attribution models out there, the pros and cons of each, and see which model is the right model for your business. 

Are you currently doing marketing attribution? Let us know in the comments below or reach out to us here to learn more about how InsightSquared can help you with your marketing attribution.