Welcome to our DIY Attribution series here at CaliberMind! In this blog, we’ll look into the complexities and challenges of implementing multi-touch attribution within organizations. When you have a new system, questions, inconsistencies, and even distrust are common. Go ahead, groan. We hear you. That’s why CaliberMind’s Camela Thompson wrote the article: 6 Reasons Everyone Loves to Hate Attribution.
However, don’t panic – this is all part of the process. It’s important to understand that attribution models are just that – models. They are tools to help us understand which channels or tactics are performing well.
What happens when your marketing content is resonating, sales are up, but something doesn’t feel right? This could indicate that it’s time to reassess your current attribution model.
Remember, achieving ‘perfect’ data is just a dream, which is why you must do your best to estimate your marketing ROI in the way the rest of the business understands. As CaliberMind’s VP of Customer Success and Revenue Operations, I’m here to help identify potential red flags, offer troubleshooting advice, and guide you on when it may be time to call in the experts.
What to Look For When Troubleshooting Attribution Issues
Often, the biggest issues come from misunderstanding. Attribution is not about assigning a concrete value to each touchpoint, but rather about understanding the role and impact of each touchpoint within the customer journey. It’s about seeing the bigger picture, while also being able to delve into the details when necessary. The power of an attribution model lies in its ability to be adjusted and refined over time, based on insights gained.
When starting an attribution project, it’s important to involve stakeholders from marketing, sales, and finance to avoid building the model in a silo. Challenges often arise when trying to gain cross-functional buy-in due to different viewpoints from various teams. It is important to ensure all relevant parties are involved throughout the process to resolve this issue.
The complexity of the attribution model can make it challenging to explain, so it’s crucial to have comprehensive data and documentation. Teams explaining the model should be capable of communicating effectively at all levels.
Common In-CRM Model Limitations
B2B sales are intricate, with CRM systems struggling to account for all customer interactions. It’s important to understand the limitations of your in-CRM attribution models. Single-touch models fall short in B2B sales. As noted in “The SiriusDecisions Buying Decision Process Framework” report (2015), standard buying groups for B2B solutions usually involve six to ten decision-makers, each of whom has a variety of interactions with the brand throughout the purchasing process.
The opportunity influence model is also flawed due to its recency bias, only capturing the last campaign interacted with before conversion. CRMs, being relational databases, fail to associate loosely connected interactions, often overlooking previous brand engagements. While using campaign members and opportunity contact roles can help build a more comprehensive view, CRMs still struggle with time-bound reporting.
Interim Measures for Attribution Issues
Identifying limitations and gaps in your attribution model is the first step. The following in-house steps can help manage these issues:
- Automate Addition of Contact Roles: Automate the addition of contact roles in opportunities within your CRM to avoid manual data entry by salespeople.
- Enforce Primary Contact Association: Remove the option to create opportunities without selecting a specific contact. This ensures at least one contact role is assigned to each opportunity.
- Conduct Source Audits: Avoid using lead sources as a catchall for every campaign. Limit lead source options and categorize how each person is treated based on each kind of inbound or outbound lead.
Maintaining Robust Models
Once a robust model is built, regular data hygiene is necessary for maintaining accuracy. This includes:
- Avoiding False Positives: Be careful to attribute opportunities correctly. Instead of calculating campaign results for all invitees, only count those who attended a webinar.
- Data Deduplication: Regularly merge duplicate data like leads, contacts, and accounts to ensure all relevant data is integrated correctly.
Red Flags In Internal Questions
Skill or technology gaps are often at the heart of attribution issues. Maybe the IT team doesn’t understand marketing as a discipline and doesn’t know what to look for in the data. Or maybe you don’t have the necessary integrations between your data warehouse and business intelligence to assess your spending on social media campaigns.
Whatever issues you may have in your attribution model, knowing which questions to listen out for will help you tune in and address issues early.
Lateral Inquiries
One of the more common red flags that your company is struggling with its attribution model is a conflict between the CMO and CFO when it’s time to secure next year’s budget. The CFO often applies “internal pressure to justify” the budget, but marketing struggles to produce evidence of ROI on previous campaigns.
An example of a scenario I’ve seen in the past is when the marketing team wants to extend a campaign on Twitter or a series of customer round-tables that they feel have been successful. The sticking point is that the team doesn’t have the data to connect these efforts to actual opportunities to prove their effectiveness.
Top-Down Inquiries
Another red flag is when the executives ask about reallocating the budget from one campaign to another and the marketing team is unable to assess how the proposal would impact revenue because it doesn’t have the means to quantify how a particular campaign performed. For example, the CEO wants to drop a big tradeshow in favor of a webinar. The marketing team needs historical measurements for both tactics to be able to accurately predict the net impact of a proposed reallocation.
Especially in this belt-tightening economy, marketing teams need to ask – and answer – the question, “How do I optimize the budget I’ve got?”
Bottom-Up Inquiries
Often you can find a gap in attribution when a campaign manager needs to show accountability and defend their efforts. If a campaign manager can’t tie their marketing efforts to revenue and pipeline, they’re going to have trouble getting the trust of the rest of the business.
When a manager proposes a new strategy, the campaign specialist needs to answer questions like, “Why?”, “Have we ever done any content (like that) before?”, and “Can we measure similar content?” Without data from past campaigns, it’ll be difficult to persuade higher-ups to sign off on future campaigns.
How to Look at Key Attribution Examples
A common mistake is not understanding that attribution is a backward-looking metric and it’s not designed to tell you where to allocate your budget. Attribution vendors are striving towards looking forward to roadmaps now with the advent of generative AI and machine learning.
What touches are missing? Why are we skeptical of the numbers? Dissect your buyer journey. Get buy-in from other groups. Every model is different. Everybody’s got a different use case. It just depends on how the business is structured.
Do you even have the right infrastructure in place to capture those touchpoints? Are you tracking calls? Are you on Outreach or Salesforce? What is tracking email responses and then how do you get those touches into the model? There is an art and science involved and it is very much an organization-by-organization thing.
Sometimes, there’s some skepticism from the other parts of the revenue organization. Additionally, some organizations are chomping at the bit and want to see which sales cadence is outperforming another sales cadence. Maybe there is a cadence going to stage two in the funnel and they want to dissect that. So there is some utility in thinking holistically about the touches. But perhaps starting small with marketing and is an iterative process bringing some of those other organizations.
Understanding UTMs in Attribution
Understanding UTMs (Urchin Tracking Modules) and their role in marketing attribution is essential for measuring and improving marketing effectiveness. UTMs help identify how visitors arrive at a website, enabling you to understand what drives engagement. For successful attribution, understanding how medium, source, and campaign are related to each other is crucial to understanding UTMs.
Further, understanding the full customer journey, from the top of the funnel to conversion, can be challenging. UTMs can track this journey, even into Salesforce, helping draw insights beyond mere ad views. For instance, a campaign may seem successful due to high volume, but a smaller campaign may have a greater impact. In B2B marketing, where the sales cycle is longer and involves multiple stakeholders, UTMs can track top-of-the-funnel activities and link them to conversions.
These tools are crucial in manipulating and understanding data beyond just CRM or marketing automation platforms. Encouraging teams to understand basic database design, such as tables, rows, and primary keys, will ensure a solid foundation for exploring more complex data models.
How Can an Attribution Project Be Implemented Across Teams?
Sell the benefits of the models and the outcomes as a win for all teams. Focus on the achievements of bringing the data together into one platform. Communicate they are an important part of the process, have a voice, and will benefit from the results.
Ensure you have all your fundamentals in place whether or not you are using a platform or trying to get something built in-house. Do your due diligence to ensure everything makes sense with the way that your systems are already in place so that you’re not reinventing the wheel, but having those conversations about whether this is an opportunity to reinvent the wheel in another platform or with another strategy that you are doing at the same time.
Get those in place before you get into the attribution platform because, with multi-touch attribution, you’ve to have a UTM strategy in place. Otherwise, it is not going to work very well for you to be able to group your online and offline engagements and look at the journey. Therefore, start now by having those foundations there. Evaluating if you’ve got the foundations ready is a good starting place to see if your organization is ready for attribution since it can be easily sold as the fix-all, but it is not. A lot of times, when you don’t have that there some organizations do struggle to get everything in place. Getting that in place beforehand and then getting the buy-in from many teams so that when it’s implemented, you’re already off to a great start and you can start using it efficiently right away.
When You Need to Call in the A-Team
If you’re a startup of ten people, you’re too early for a tool like CaliberMind. But you still need to do some basic attribution. When you go DIY, it won’t be long before you realize how many resources and integrations you need to reach the necessary level of sophistication to start answering tough questions from the executive team.
When you reach this inflection point, ask yourself if you can keep pushing uphill with your homegrown model or if you need to hire another headcount. You can alternatively opt to spend half of an additional salary on an external attribution solution with a team that maintains your attribution model, builds integrations, does the data science and fixing, and guides you in best practices.
To Get a Three-Dimensional View of Your Sales Funnel
Attribution solutions like CaliberMind customize data models to fit your unique organizational needs. They create a master timeline of all the touches across all the people, including touches from systems outside of your CRM’s relational models. We view the whole timeline as an atomic unit and then break it down into subatomic particles that represent each touch throughout the sales cycle.
By getting to that granular level and capturing those micro-interactions, you’re able to assemble a much more robust model over the entirety of the sales life cycle. Once you have all the touches ordered sequentially, you know the order of the touches, the order in which buyers got engaged at which time. With this data backbone in place, you can see which touches helped source the opportunity at the top of the funnel and which touches helped educate through the consideration phase, on through down to the sale.
You don’t have to love attribution to love what it delivers – evidence that helps your marketing team optimize its resources with the data to prove it. You can choose an attribution solution like CaliberMind or stay tuned as we drill down deeper on how to build your homegrown model into a more robust attribution machine.
