Does the term, multi-touch revenue attribution, make you want to leave the page? Digital marketing “evangelist” and author Avinash Kaushik says there are few things more complicated—and he was once the Director of Research and Analytics at Intuit!
But there’s an important concept here. And the question is without money and staff for a lot of complex research and analytics, how can small and mid-size business owners make it work for them?
Multi-touch revenue attribution, basically, is calculating how various (usually online) marketing efforts work together to produce sales and conversions. Add the word, model, and it means a framework for doing this. Kaushik refers to the many models out there as “the good, the bad and the ugly,” which sounds complicated and frustrating! But overall, the topic’s a red-hot one, even though it’s poorly understood and used.
In most cases, Kaushik says, companies want to understand which digital marketing channels (social, display, YouTube, referral, email, search and others) contributed to conversions. Many web analytics tools by default attribute a conversion to the channel immediately prior to the conversion, or “last click attribution.” But this is just part of what’s going on. What you want instead is a full picture of all marketing activity prior to the conversion.
Here’s a great example, for one business’s website, 50 conversions came from people who visited the site in the same order, starting with social, then a direct visit, then an organic search, then a referral click-through and finally, one last direct visit, which led to the conversions. What the business owners wants to know: How should I dole out credit for this group of conversions? Should direct get 50 percent? Or should social? Should something get 100 or even 2 percent? There can be other important variables, too, much as whether all the activity is coming from a single browser or across multiple screens (mobile devices, for example). Or your analysis could be “across digital channels” or “online to store.”
Kfir Pravda, CEO of the Pravda Media Group, says that finding the best model for your business is far from simple. His own approach involved “reverse engineering” the steps of customers’ journeys to conversion to determine the most important events in a customer life cycle. Then guidelines for determining the right revenue attribution model were developed:
- Track everything. You need a framework for tracking every tough point with leads and customers. This requires clear funnel mapping, with the right tools and technologies in place for capturing all the important interactions as prospects/customers move through the funnel.
- Attribute revenues to ONLY those touch points you can influence. If you can’t impact or change a touch point, it’s useless from a business point of view. Don’t forget that this whole exercise is about figuring out where to make investments that will increase future revenue.
- Don’t overlook everything else. Even if you’re not attributing revenue to a specific event, say, you can still capture useful information about your potential customers and your business by tracking and analyzing it.
If your head’s spinning, don’t despair! SEO Takeaways has published Google Analytics Attribution Modeling: A Beginner’s Guide—the perfect place to begin dipping your toes in the revenue attribution waters! Right off the bat, you’ll learn that Google Analytics produces five different types of multi-channel funnel reports that will help you find out the following:
- How marketing channels work together to create conversions
- How much time elapsed between visitors’ initial interest and the purchase
- What role did prior website referrals, searches and ads play in conversions
- How to attribute conversions back to a marketing channel
Image courtesy of Kittikun Atsawintarangkul / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The post Multi-touch revenue attribution tells you what’s working appeared first on Business Cash Advance.com.