Attribution has a bad rap. It’s extremely useful, and we know it can improve decision-making—but it will always be an estimate. So if people don’t understand its limitations or how different purposes require different setups, it’s doomed to fail.
In this article, we’ll dive into the two types of attribution: revenue (or department) attribution, which identifies which marketing, sales, or partner activities generated an opportunity, and ROAS attribution, which helps marketers use their ad budget on the most effective campaigns.
Before you start measuring, you’ll need buy-in from your entire go-to-market organization. That’s easier said than done.
Two main factors contribute to this problem:
- A mismatch between what executives want to do and how the tool is implemented
- A mismatch between what can be tracked and what we want to track
CaliberMind helps customers successfully secure cross-functional buy-in. Here’s how to realize tremendous results when you set up revenue attribution or ROAS attribution to answer the right questions with the right models.
Note: These best practices apply to new business acquisitions. The signals you use for renewals and expansions would follow different recommendations.
Purpose of Revenue Attribution
Most executives try to use attribution to answer the question: How much pipeline or bookings should each department get credit for?
These executives realize we need more than single-source reporting because:
- B2B opportunity cycles tend to be long
- There are multiple buyers in a buyer committee on a single account
- There’s no way to pinpoint which touch, out of dozens, was THE touch that made the difference
Attaining Cross-Functional Buy-In
The most important thing to remember when you build a model to answer this question is that buy-in from other departments is only possible if they feel fairly represented. We must figure out which touchpoints to include from sales, marketing, and our partners.
Remember, not everything is trackable, and attribution should be represented as a good-faith estimate. Including all touchpoints will naturally distort the model to favor marketing, creating distrust from other departments.
Sales will have a hard time accepting that a page visit on the website is considered just as valuable as a sales meeting with the prospect. Instead of trying to create an intricate weighting model, sit down with your sales and channel stakeholders and agree on the touchpoints that should and should not be included.
How Do I Configure Revenue Attribution?
We recommend tracking the following touchpoints:
Sales:
- Completed calls with positive dispositions
- Held meetings
- Email responses that are not the result of an auto-response or out-of-office
Marketing:
- Salesforce Campaign responses (only include the subset of campaign activities that can rationally lead to sales follow-up, like form fills or webinar attendance)
- LinkedIn lead gen form
Partners:
- Deal registrations
- Submitted leads sourced to a partner referral
By restricting your attribution calculation to only credit meaningful interactions with your prospects—when they are proactively and consciously interacting with your company—you can represent an estimate of how each department has contributed to pipeline and bookings.
FAQ: Should I weigh my model more heavily when it comes to certain touchpoints or personas?
We don’t recommend it. If you ask different stakeholders to define who the primary contact should be, you’ll get different answers. It’s also impossible to say whether the first recorded touch was actually the first touch or more meaningful than other touches. Agree cross-functionally on the “right” touchpoints to include then use the simplest model to estimate department attribution.
Purpose of ROAS Attribution
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) attribution can help answer the question: Which digital campaigns are the most cost-effective? CaliberMind tackles this question using event tables and default attribution setups that create campaign events for ad click-throughs that can be linked back to a digital ad campaign.
What does this mean for attribution? If your digital ad CTA is filling out a form for a content download or demo request, you will have an event for the form fill and an event for the digital campaign. That means each touch receives its own portion of attribution. In the eyes of some marketers, this dilutes the attribution, which negatively impacts ROI.
But remember, the finance department views ROI as a calculation of revenue (in bookings) versus the cost of the tactic. Since attribution will always be an estimate, it’s impossible to get to exact return on investment numbers by the campaign. This isn’t a popular statement, but it’s the truth.
Your finance team and CEO need to understand that marketing to bookings can’t be balanced like an accounting balance sheet. Marketing influence is tangential. We’re dealing with a massive amount of brand interactions for every sale. There isn’t a one-to-one correlation.
How Do I Configure ROAS Attribution?
The purpose of this exercise is to eliminate duplication wherever possible. There are many touchpoints that lead to a closed deal, so the goal isn’t precision but to shoot for a very close estimate.
We recommend tracking the following touchpoints:
Sales:
- Completed calls with positive dispositions
- Held meetings
- Email responses that are not the result of an auto-response or out-of-office
Marketing:
- Salesforce Campaign responses without an associated channel of Paid Search, Programmatic, or Paid Social (only include the subset of campaign activities that can rationally lead to sales follow-up, like form fills or webinar attendance)
- LinkedIn lead gen form
- Campaign Members with the Campaign Types of Paid Search, Programmatic, and Paid Social
Partners:
- Deal registrations
- Submitted leads sourced to a partner referral
FAQ: Should I weigh my model more heavily when it comes to certain touchpoints or personas?
Just like with revenue attribution, we don’t recommend it. Different stakeholders have different definitions for primary contact, and it’s impossible to know which touch was first or more meaningful. Always agree cross-functionally on which touchpoints to include. Use the simplest model to estimate ROAS attribution.
How is CaliberMind ROAS Different from My Advertising Platforms?
Most advertising platforms look for any account match and assign 100% of the opportunity value to one digital touchpoint. They also regularly calculate return based on all opportunity dollars, regardless of whether that opportunity is open, won, or lost.
CaliberMind uses attribution to assign to each touch a portion of the opportunity amount. We calculate ROI as the bookings associated with campaign touchpoints divided by the cost of the campaign. We help accurately attribute revenue to specific marketing touchpoints and campaigns, optimize marketing budget allocation based on channel performance, and improve overall marketing ROI.
Learn more about how CaliberMind’s CDP-driven attribution engine helps companies improve alignment and answer their most pressing attribution questions.
