3 Reasons to Take a Multitouch Approach to Attribution

The path from sales prospect to new customer can often feel like a long and winding journey. In between your customer’s initial contact with your company and the final purchasing decision, many smaller marketing interactions, or touches, happen along the way. How can you determine which campaign or action had the most influence on a purchasing decision? Applying an attribution model with a multitouch approach can help make data-driven marketing decisions and assign revenue projections to marketing interactions. By weighing the importance of each customer interaction before sale conversions, you can compare the costs and benefits of marketing tools, including webinars, eBooks, conferences, cold calls, white papers, and emails, when budgeting marketing dollars.

A few different models exist for weighing and measuring the impact of marketing interactions:

• Linear Attribution Model: The linear attribution model gives equal revenue credit to every marketing touch along the buyer’s journey.
• Time-Decay Attribution Model: The time-decay attribution model gives incrementally more revenue credit to marketing touches that occur closer to sales conversion, with the assumption that later interactions have more impact on the purchasing decision.
• Position-Based Attribution Model: The position-based attribution model, or U-shaped attribution, gives greater revenue credit to the first and last marketing touches, emphasizing both lead generation and last-touch events.
• Interaction-Based Attribution Model: The interaction-based attribution model takes a customized approach to weighing the specific marketing interactions along the sales journey. For example, an email click-through could be given less revenue credit than a quote request.

Tracking these small customer interactions and weighing their significance to the purchasing decision can have a major impact on meeting conversion goals. We think this multitouch approach to attribution is a good one for three important reasons:

• You spend your marketing dollars where they have the most impact on sales.

Sure, your email campaign had a high click-through rate, but did those potential customers convert to sales? Apply a linear attribution model for a better look at the entire funnel as well as to help create a more well-rounded marketing strategy that spends money where it can have the most impact.

• You’ll find your customers where they are.

Have you seen plenty of marketing interaction but no increase in sales? An interaction-based attribution model can weigh each touch to identify those that make the most impact on the purchasing decision. If potential customers stop interacting after a webinar or white paper request, this approach can find them there and help complete the journey with a more effective marketing tool.

• You can project future growth.

The ability to assign a dollar value to certain types of marketing activities can help make difficult ROI decisions. For example, is it worth your company’s time to attend or sponsor a conference to generate first-touch sales leads? Based on data from previous events and sales, this multitouch approach can help you make an estimation for future growth from these types of activities.