Three Key Tips for Effective Cross-Channel Marketing Attribution

The customer journey is constantly changing, and conversion hotspots are more important than ever. Determining your campaign’s most powerful stepping stones can be tough, however. Between geo-location apps driving local business traffic, social media, QR codes, and one-stop-shop e-commerce portals, plenty of digital marketers are left with the same question, time and time again:

Where is the traffic coming from, anyway?

Finding an Attribution Model that Suits Your Needs

When reaching out to new audiences, old consumer segments, current buyers, or expanding fan bases, it’s important to understand your marketing mix’s most effective conversion approaches. Marketing attribution analysis isn’t necessarily new, but today’s tools have completely redefined it. By making the most out of your brand’s outreach channels, you can supercharge the data derived from it. Naturally, this works the other way around, too. Optimizing the customer’s experience, channel to channel, is the full-circle achievement most marketers strive for—and endlessly so.

Your marketing mix attribution is unique to your brand. Because of this, it’s important to hone in on your brand’s unique channel access points, right off the bat. Not only will this give your marketing attribution analysis approach a boost from the beginning—but it’ll help paint a bigger picture of your all-around advertising performance:

With more knowledge comes increasingly effective marketing approaches. As your leads grow in number, and as your ROI begins to expand, those beginning ‘reference points’ will be amazing, broad-scope reference points.

The Nitty Gritty: Top Tips for Optimized Attribution

So, what are the best ways to achieve impactful insights? We know that data-driven, cross-channel analytics fuels marketing attribution, but how can we leverage a marketing budget with new directions? The attribution process can get a little complicated, and several obstacles face fledgling campaigns. Fortunately, knowing the right approaches to take, ahead of time, can make a big difference.

Check out these top attribution tips, and optimize your analytics approaches for the best results possible.

Tip One: Expand Beyond Last-Click Models

First-click and last-click attribution models are the bread and butter of cross-channel analysis: They show us where the customer’s journey begins—as well as where it ends. We can’t abandon these essential metrics, of course, but it’s wise to target the lesser-approached metrics between the two.

The last-click attribution model, here, is a great place to rethink, redefine and empower our strategy further. This attribution model assigns ‘conversion points’ to the last-known click location our customers visited. This said it doesn’t always paint a full picture. Here’s where non-direct click attribution analysis comes in.

Last non-direct click attribution assigns conversion credit to the final source which wasn’t direct traffic. If a potential shopper arrives at your website, for example—and if they click your display ad without converting—we should still keep an eye out for a return visit. If they do arrive the following day, making a purchase, we can safely credit our display ad. This may not be a conversion driven by direct traffic, but it’s a vital metric to consider: Conversions driven by direct traffic tend to stem from shoppers who’ve already seen our campaign. As such, measuring this bulk of direct traffic isn’t always the best for identifying the triggers behind them—as new triggers, more often than not, get mixed in with the old.

Tip Two: Give Linear Attribution a Shot

One of the reasons marketing attribution analysis can be overwhelming, regardless of a pre-existing campaign’s size, is the sheer number of channels to analyze. Consumers will follow paths of purchase through multiple avenues—both digital and physical. Keeping track of each one, and assigning different ‘relevancy’ weights to each, can quickly become expensive.

But what if we weighed each channel equally?

This is where linear attribution comes in: Depending on your campaign design, you may not want to weigh too heavily on your primary channel. A lot of channels contribute to your customer’s eventual destination, whether the touch points they encounter span across targeted ads, SEO-powered Google results, shared LinkedIn content or real-time offers.

The linear attribution model serves to weigh each channel equally, to pin down exactly where the customer’s journey begins, ends, changes direction, or hops across channels. If a customer finds your website via a Facebook ad, for example, they may not visit it right away. But let’s say, a few days later, organic search results direct them to your blog. From here, they begin exploring your content. Then, eventually, they convert.

In such a case, using the linear attribution method can help you analyze which channels have the biggest impact. While metrics like time and conversion rates are certainly useful, this type of attribution model goes hand-in-hand with PPC campaigns—as display ads, more often than not, contribute to the customer’s journey in some way, shape or form.

Tip Three: Keep Your Ad Spend In Mind

Speaking of PPC campaigns, it’s important to consider your ad spend. It’s one of the best ‘overall’ indicators of your current approach’s effectiveness, but it’s also one that has an incredibly long reach.

To make the most out of this metric, be sure to record your campaign on a day-to-day basis. Attribute your ad spend to different channels, primarily, with each ad’s source. By knowing whether your biggest opportunities exist alongside Facebook’s Ad Library, Google Ads, or Instagram, for example, you’ll know where to allocate your funds for better attribution.

You’ll also glean deeper insights into your channels as a whole, assisting any linear attribution and non-direct click analysis methods along the way.

Making the Most of Marking Attribution Analysis

Understandably, effective marketing attribution analysis requires powerful data tools. It also requires a good bit of upkeep, which can be a little cumbersome while managing campaigns as a whole. Fortunately, it’s still possible to set up your own attribution analysis strategy with some professional aid.

Digilant can help you create powerful attribution frameworks for growth, scaling, and success via today’s leading analytics tools and strategies. A well-established, empowered campaign is right around the corner—and we’re here to help, every step of the way. Contact us here.