What Is Marketing Attribution & How Do You Report on It?

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Marketers engage with customers on more channels than ever before. Whether you’re working with influencers or posting short-form videos, it makes marketing attribution essential for continued results.

This is because the buyer’s journey is far from linear. Consumers engage with brands through multiple touchpoints before they make a purchase.

For a lot of marketers, getting visibility into the most effective touchpoints can be tough. They have to wade through cobbled data from different sources, spend hours crunching numbers in spreadsheets, or wait for a marketing ops resource to help them. Unless they’re using marketing attribution reporting.

But what is marketing attribution? And how can you use it to improve your marketing strategy? Keep reading, or jump to the section you’re looking for:

What is marketing attribution?
What is an attribution report?
Types of Attribution Models
How to Use Marketing Attribution Reports
GDPR Considerations
Marketing Attribution Best Practices
Marketing Attribution Tools

For example, if marketers want to see how a blog post or social media strategy impacted sales, they might use marketing attribution techniques.

Here’s how our product team at HubSpot describes it:

“Attribution surfaces which interactions a person or group of people took along their journey toward a desired outcome or ‘conversion’ point.”

Lead Attribution

Lead attribution is a type of marketing attribution. It shows how marketers impact the number of leads that come from a given channel, touchpoint, or campaign.

Lead attribution data helps teams understand which marketing efforts are most effective for generating qualified leads.

Leads aren’t sales, but they are important because they show how marketing content or strategies are gaining prospects or new audiences. In turn, these prospects can lead to increased sales or revenue.

B2B Marketing Attribution

B2B Marketing attribution is a type of marketing attribution for the business-to-business field.

B2B companies sell products or services to other businesses or professionals in their industry. While B2C attribution could relate to smaller purchases, B2B attribution covers purchases from companies, memberships, or leads.

B2B marketing attribution data helps B2B companies connect marketing efforts to ROI and CLV. It’s also essential for data-driven decision-making.

Why is marketing attribution important?

This approach to analysis helps marketers understand the most valuable marketing channels. It helps you connect marketing tactics to ROI and CLV. Marketing attribution is also useful for making a business case for new initiatives and changes in strategy.

The purpose of attribution reporting is to help you understand how marketing efforts inspire users to convert and build relationships with your brand. Marketing attribution helps you see patterns and actions that your team can use to improve strategies in the future.

Types of Attribution Models

Now that you know what marketing attribution is and why it’s important, you may be wondering how it works. After all, not all marketing channels have the same impact on conversions.

Pulling together all the interactions of your buyer journey into a …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog