What is B2B Marketing Attribution?
In essence, it’s a marketing measurement method that takes into account multiple online touchpoints along the account or contact’s journey, and then assigns credit to each touchpoint based on varying logic per business.
By online touchpoints we’re referring to paid (e.g. search, display, social), owned (e.g. website, emails, demos, blogs, social media), and earned media (e.g. press coverage, 3rd party social media & owned media mentions) — across all digital properties.
How then can you determine which touchpoints and journeys perform best and which fall short so you can make informed budget allocation decisions?
Let’s explore the most commonly used attribution models in B2B Marketing.
Two main types of B2B Marketing Attribution models
- Single-touch Attribution
This can refer to both first or last-touch attribution. The former assigns full credit to the first known point of contact in an account journey, whereas last-touch places all the credit on the last known touchpoint.
- Multi-touch Attribution (MTA)
This measurement approach takes a more holistic view and covers the entire funnel, delivering insights across the account’s journey. When using MTA, touchpoints can be weighted equally or proportionally, depending on the MTA model that’s being used (e.g. linear, time decay, U-shaped, W-shaped, or full path, custom, or Markov chain).
What are the benefits of MTA-led B2B Marketing Attribution?
Clearly, both first and last-touch attribution ignore the reality of an average account journey, that ranges between a few dozens to a few hundreds of touchpoints per account.
Given this complex reality, MTA offers a more accurate approach to mapping journeys and gives marketers the ability to draw performance-based conclusions.
1. Decluttering the clutter
Account journeys are made complicated by orphaned leads that are not associated with accounts listed in your CRM, multiple contacts, multiple channels, multiple campaigns, multiple events, and countless other touchpoints.
In this complex reality, the more accurate and detailed the representation of journeys is, the better the understanding of where influence lies and which combination of touchpoints are performing the best in terms of ROI and ROAS.
Being able to identify which channels, campaigns, and events yield promising results, while pinpointing those that underperform — will enable you to allocate your budget more efficiently, double down on profitable initiatives, or shut down those that are draining your budget.
2. Good attribution is accurate attribution
Allocating credit along the length and breadth of your accounts’ journey means you’re not placing undue focus or budget on the first or last touchpoints. Considering that relying on either of these single-touch methods presents a skewed picture of the key influencers in the path to conversion, opting for MTA means your decision making will be based on a much more accurate picture.
To put things in perspective, let’s say a contact associated with one of your target accounts sees one of your paid ads on LinkedIn, searches for your brand on Google, reads one of your blogs, downloads a whitepapers, and then a week later a 2nd contact signs up to your webinar, and then a 3rd contact searches for your brand on Google, finds one of your landing pages and signs up for a free trial.
Who’s to say that the first paid touchpoint should get credit over the last organic search? Or vice versa? MTA ensures each channel gets its fair share of the success and enables you to plan and forecast accordingly.
3. Multi-touch attribution means staying agile
Multi-touch places all attribution data in one model, eliminating the need to jump between reports to try and identify the value of each touchpoint. The result is increased agility and the ability to pivot your strategy when needed, based on real-time insights.
For example, say a big chunk of your marketing budget was dedicated to a bottom-of-the-funnel promotional email campaign. Your MTA model, however, showed that a social media campaign on Twitter is proving to be very effective when it comes to promoting demo registrations.
Given this promising trend, you can adapt your strategy and place more emphasis and spend on Twitter activities in order to maximize your ROAS.
Key metrics in B2B Marketing Attribution
Simply put, good data is the key to assessing the true performance of every investment you make and every activity you launch.
Keeping a constant finger on the pulse of your key metrics, will help you get a clear picture of which activities are underperforming, and which are helping propel your business forward.
Let’s explore the top 9 metrics every B2B marketer needs to watch over like a hawk when running attribution analysis, including handy formulas to help you properly calculate your KPIs:
1. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
These would include all targeted leads who have shown interest in your product or service thanks to marketing efforts.
Generally speaking, MQLs fit your ICP and can be worked into your pipeline, although some marketers prefer qualifying MQLs before handing them over to the Sales team — to ensure their quality remains consistent.
Working out your cost per MQL can help you plan ahead for similar campaigns.
Formula: Cost per MQL = Total cost / Total number of MQLs
2. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
These are marked by your Sales team as highly likely to convert. Your SQLs are a strong indicator of incoming revenue while also telling you which of your marketing activities are delivering on their promise.
Formula: Cost per SQL = Total cost / Total number of SQLs
3. Web traffic
One of the most common indicators that your campaigns and SEO efforts are performing well.
You can measure your traffic trends using tools like Google Analytics or a trusted, next-gen attribution platform that offers a holistic, drillable view of your digital presence.
4. Leads
The ultimate RevOps metric, here we’ll be measuring the number of incoming leads per campaign. Bear in mind that not all leads were created equal, so generating leads as a goal by itself is not enough, especially if they don’t help generate revenue.
Some ad clicks are obviously more expensive than others, but if more costly leads end up converting at a higher rate and the channels that drives them consistently yield a positive ROI — it would be a safer bet for you to double down on that channel than keep spending precious budget on leads that rarely convert generated by cheaper channels.
Formula: Cost per Lead (CPL) = Total marketing spend / Total number of new leads
5. Closed-won deals
Also called opportunities, your closed-won deals are most probably the most valuable marketing ROI benchmark and ABM metric.
6. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
Another important metric that can help you determine the success rates of a given campaign, MRR will include revenue generated from all recurring deals.
Because of its predictable nature, MRR plays a key role in sales forecasting, budget allocations, and campaign performance optimization.
Formula: MRR = Monthly recurring revenue generated by paying accounts
7. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) / Cost Per Conversion (CAC)
This metric is an excellent indicator to how efficient your go-to-market team is.
CPA or CAC = Marketing spend / Number of new customers per campaign
8. Average Deal Size
Similar to MRR, average deal size gives you total generated revenue within a set period of time.
Formula: Average Deal Size = Total revenue generated within a set period / Closed-won opportunities within the same period of time
9. Average Sales Cycle
This would be the average length of time during which a lead converts into a closed-won opportunity or a campaign brings in paying customers.
Identifying which campaigns take longer to convert (and why, ideally) will help you optimize your activities for a faster and more streamlined SaaS sales funnel.
Formula: Average Sales Cycle = Total number of days from first-touch to conversion / Total number of closed-one deals
Challenges in B2B Marketing Attribution
B2B Marketing Attribution, for all of its clear strategic and tactical benefits, is not without its challenges. Let’s have a quick dive into a few of them here:
1. Messy & fragmented data
Today, most companies store their Sales & Marketing data on multiple platforms, including CRM systems, Content Management systems, Project Management softwares, BI and attribution solutions, and sometimes even the occasional legacy platforms.
Problem is, in most cases these systems operate in silos, bringing marketers to struggle with growing heaps of raw data that are almost impossible to make sense of in a holistic, meaningful way. And if your data is not stored in a centralized location, so it can then be unified, de-duped, de-anonymized, and decluttered on a regular basis — it’s highly likely that your data will end up causing you more harm than good.
Other than opting for a trusted, next-gen attribution platform that can declutter your messy data for you, be sure to run periodic audits of your CRM data to ensure it meets your quality standards. Fix missing contact fields, remove duplicate records, ensure fields are filled out properly, and correct typos and inaccuracies.
Why bother, you ask?
Well, poor quality data creates holes in your analysis, leads to incorrect assumptions and then ultimately to wasted budgets. In fact, data quality is credited as the biggest barrier to revenue attribution success (43%), so if it’s making informed decisions you’re after — start by cleaning up your data.
2. Lack of industry-wide standard
Despite the fact that last-touch attribution falls short of its multi-touch counterpart, it is nonetheless the industry standard for billing. Primarily because multi-touch comes with a wider set of complexities — such as the need to get buy-in from all involved parties in the ecosystem.
Let’s say you opt for a W-model to base your MTA on, by which each main touchpoint is assigned 30% of credits and the remaining 10% is divided between the intermediary touchpoints. In the real world, that would mean the three main touchpoints had agreed to take on only 30% of the credits, instead of the last-click swooping in to claim 100%.
All partners, advertisers, and ad networks need to be aligned and in agreement, which calls for cross-industry collaboration — something that has yet to be materialized in a meaningful way.
3. Challenging to implement, difficult to analyze (when done on your own)
When you don’t have an intuitive B2B Marketing Attribution software designed for non-technical marketers, you either resort to data analysts to query the data and extract insights for you, or alternatively — do nothing.
Neither are good options, as the first is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and the latter keeps you in the dark when it comes to your decision making, while actionable insights remain hidden underneath your data.
Bottom line is, not all companies have the skillset or resources required to run complicated attribution calculations internally, or the ability to glean the insights they deliver.
4. Difficulty in validating results
When dealing with inaccurate attribution solutions that rely on inaccurate data, most marketers will find a perplexing gap between attribution results to actual attributable touchpoints, e.g. seeing that a certain touchpoint is credited with a specific conversion, even though you know it happened organically.
Bear in mind that when you work out of messy data — you get messy attribution.
TLDR
- In today’s increasingly fragmented reality that consists of endless channels, platforms, events, campaigns, and media sources — a reliable B2B Marketing Attribution solution that’s based on a multi-touch model helps you make sense of it all. It offers a single source-of-truth, cleans your data, visualizes it, and then enables you to draw tangible insights that can be put into action.
- Although last-touch remains the industry standard for billing purposes, multi-touch attribution models should be used in parallel to deliver insights on your marketing efforts and help inform your strategy.
- Be sure to determine your KPIs in advance to be able to focus on revenue-generating activities. When running attribution analysis, you should be able to easily drill down into your accounts’ journeys, identify trends, pinpoint marketing activities that are delivering or underperforming, and forecast to ensure data-driven budgeting decisions. No data analysts required.
On the hunt for an intuitive B2B Marketing Attribution solution that will help you get quick, actionable ROAS & performance insights? Read more on how to choose the right one for you.
