Introduction
As a marketer, you’re probably used to running campaigns that require multiple touchpoints. You’ve got ads, emails, and everything in between—and if you’re doing things right, those touchpoints are all working together to make sales happen. But it’s easy to get lost in all of the data that comes from these different sources. That’s why lead attribution is so important: It helps you see how successful your multi-channel marketing strategy really is by giving you insights into which channels drive sales at critical moments in the customer journey.
Lead Attribution helps you get the most bang for your buck
When you’re spending money on advertising, it’s important to get the most bang for your buck. How much better than average are you doing? What is your ROI? Lead attribution allows you to determine which channels and tactics are working well for you and which need improvement.
It’s all about efficiency.
The importance of efficiency is simple: cost, time and effort are all finite resources that cannot be replenished. If you’re going to spend them on something, you want to be sure that it’s worth it. Why? Because once they’re gone, they’re gone—and there’s no getting them back (well…not unless you can travel through time).
Lead attribution helps us make better decisions about where we invest those resources so we can get the most out of them. It also allows us to optimally allocate our limited resources toward high-value activities like customer acquisition campaigns or product development projects.
It’s time to get into specifics.
You can do this by using attribution modeling, a process that assigns a portion of your sales to each touchpoint you have with your audience.
For example, if someone clicks on an ad for your ecommerce store and buys the product online, that click is credited with 100% of the purchase. If they see another ad and then go into a physical store where they buy something from you instead of ordering it online, that offline visit gets only 1% credit for the sale. If they search for something related to what you sell online but don’t make any purchases there—maybe because they found exactly what they were looking for—then Google will give itself 0%.
These numbers are important because advertisers need them in order to figure out how much money should be spent per channel: if clicks are worth 100% while mobile ads get just one-tenth as much credit (1%), then spending more money on search ads won’t necessarily lead to more business unless those paid ads also drive people back into the offline store or website where those final purchases occur.
The case for attribution modeling
Attribution modeling is a great way to understand how your campaigns are performing. It gives you a good indicator of how well your campaigns are working, so it’s important to understand how your campaigns are performing in order to optimize them.
Attribution modeling helps you understand what is working and what isn’t. This information can be used to improve future marketing efforts by seeing what kind of results each channel or campaign type produces.
How Lead Attribution Works
Google Ads attribution modeling is based on the last-click model. However, it’s important to understand that this is not the only way to attribute leads.
Lead attribution can be defined as “the process of identifying which marketing channels drove specific conversions.”
The click stream refers to the path that a visitor takes before clicking an ad and then converting on your site (or in some cases, even just visiting your site). The conversion path describes how each individual visitor converted on your website after clicking an advertisement in Google Ads. And finally, we have the conversion funnel: a graphical representation of how users move between steps in the conversion process over time.
What Lead Attribution can do for you
- Lead attribution helps you get the most bang for your buck. With lead attribution, you can figure out what content is performing best and where to focus your efforts next.
- It helps you figure out what is working and what isn’t working in your marketing campaigns. Using data driven insights will improve your marketing decisions, which means that you’ll be able to spend more of your time focusing on things that actually make a difference in ROI rather than wasting time on things that don’t matter as much.
- It helps provide clarity into how different channels affect each other and the overall success of a campaign. This means that instead of having a bunch of random numbers floating around in an Excel file somewhere (or worse, not using any data at all), there’s actually an easy way to understand how everything works together so it doesn’t seem so overwhelming!
- It enables smarter decision making when it comes time for planning future campaigns by providing actionable insights about what works best with different types of audiences based on age group or gender etc., which makes planning easier because there’s already a general idea about who likes certain types
Conclusion
Lead Attribution is a powerful tool that can help you optimize your marketing spend and maximize your return on investment.