Why Accurate Attribution Is Important to Your Marketing Efforts

Be honest with yourself for just a moment: how much of one buyer’s journey can you accurately track? What I mean is, do you know when each buyer made conversions that led to a purchase? There’s a good chance you have no idea.

You’re not alone. In April of last year, only 25% of digital marketers believed investing in attribution models was a priority. The majority of companies consider that last click before a purchase to be the most important. Sure, it’s great to know if buyers clicked through a Facebook post or a PPC campaign just before buying, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Really, that’s like seeing a TV show spoiler on social media and losing interest in the rest of the plot. It’s important to know all the plot points, right?

Let’s take a look at some of the places customers might make smaller conversions before making a purchase. You’ll start to see why accurate attribution is so important.

Social Media and Last-Click Models

What if a customer’s first interaction with your company comes through a social media post? Maybe they click through to read one of your blogs or compare some of your products to similar companies. Because they don’t make a purchase at that time, their first touch may never be given the weight it deserves.

Let’s say, just for the sake of easy math, that twenty customers first found you through Facebook. Those twenty customers spent time with your site, investigated your products, read reviews, and then decided to make a purchase. They get their credit card ready, open their browser, type your company name into Google, and make their purchase. How many of those buyers would you know came from a Facebook post? Probably zero. Instead, you’d have records that they came from a Google search.

Now, when it’s time to investigate your marketing budget for social media, how will you account for those twenty customers who first found you through Facebook? You can’t. And that means you’ll probably cut your social marketing when you should instead be boosting it.

Blogs and First-Click Models

Let’s say you’re savvy to the fact that a last-click model doesn’t give you the first part of the story. That’s great! You have some idea of how your customers found you in the first place. Maybe they found you through a Google search for something and ended up spending a few weeks reading all your blogs. Education is important, right? Maybe after reading a compare and contrast blog that explains why your products are better than your competitors, they take the leap and make a purchase.

You’d probably consider those blogs to be one of your most powerful marketing tools, right? Right! Except you won’t even know the blogs had any influence over the buyers at all. The only thing you’ll know is that they found you for the first time through a search engine. How could you possibly give your blogs the attention they deserve if you don’t know just how important they are?

The Whole Story

What you really need is a sophisticated attribution model that shows you the full journey of the buyers in the buying cycle. Wouldn’t you love to know that your buyers are discovering you through social media? Would you love to know they’re getting quality information from your blogs? Couldn’t you better justify the cost of PPC campaigns if you could track every single buyer who made a purchase at some point after clicking through one of your ads?

We can’t market without knowing what touches customers and when. We can’t help move them through the buyers’ journey if we don’t know where they already are in the cycle. The only way to get the whole story is to read every line—give importance to every touch. And we can help you do that.