What Can You Learn from Attribution Reports?

Businesses have more channels and platforms to engage with potential customers than ever before. And this makes the customers’ journey far from a linear one as they engage with brands through multiple touchpoints before they make a purchase.

While this might be a great engagement opportunity for you, it also comes with its own challenges.

You need to know which channels or platforms generate leads and cause customers to convert most, and why. That is because you need to accurately adjust your spending on different channels according to their efficiency in order to make your marketing campaigns more profitable

But as I mentioned, this becomes harder with multiple touchpoints and more complex customer journeys of today. It may seem complicated or a lot to take on for one person or a team. This is where an attribution report can help you sort out the heaps of data and clearly see how your marketing efforts are paying back. 

But what can you learn from attribution reports? When should they be used? And what are some best practices to create attribution reports? If you want to learn all of this and more, keep reading.

What is attribution in marketing?

To put it simply, marketing attribution is a strategy to determine which marketing tactics and channels attribute to higher sales or conversions.

It is the practice of evaluating the marketing touchpoints your customers encounter on their path to purchase. Its goal is to determine which strategies or channels had the greatest impact on your customers’ decision to convert, or any other specific goal.

The aim of attribution is to prove the impact marketing has on sales, and use that data to drive more conversions and more revenue. Since your marketing team can struggle to calculate their return on investment due to data being all over the place, attribution can help solve that in the form of reports.

Why is tracking attribution important?

Keeping track of your attribution is essential to be able to adjust and improve your strategies according to what works with your target audience.

Let’s take a deeper look at how that can be beneficial:

Measures channel performance

Marketing attribution tracking offers insights into the performances of different elements in your marketing strategies.

It can help identify blogs that generate maximum leads or the emails that returned the most positive replies. For marketing, this data can be the primary source for measuring your KPI’s

For example, if you wanted to learn how a blog post or some ads you posted on Facebook or another platform impacted your sales or what generates the most revenue among your marketing efforts, a marketing attribution report will provide that to you.

Marketing attribution reports contain valuable insights that may prove essential to your marketing efforts and to see what works and what doesn’t.

Allows you to personalize the customer experience

Attribution reports include information on the performance of every type of content that you may use across channels like websites, mobile apps, and social media.

By leveraging attribution tracking, your brand can gain information about the preferences of your customers such as tone of voice and type of content.

This allows you to personalize your content and deliver it to the right customer to gain more leads.

When would you need a marketing attribution report?

You might think that you’ll need to create a marketing attribution report any time you are looking to check or prove your return on investment (ROI). However, evaluating your ROI is not all there is to it.

You may also need to rely on an attribution report when you need answers to questions like:

• How many leads and sales are your marketing channels bringing in?
• What channels and content worked well at each stage of the customer journey?
• How many leads are generated from a specific piece of marketing content?
• Which copy and artwork returned the best paid marketing results?

etc.

What can you learn from attribution reports?

Here’s a breakdown of some of the many things you can find out about with the help of a marketing attribution report:

1. Top-performing content

As I mentioned several times throughout the article, a marketing attribution report can show you which content performed best in the form of most conversions, generating leads or revenue.

Let’s say you posted two blogs covering the aspects of the same topic this month, and the first one converted 25% more visitors into customers.

And when you check your data with your attribution system, you see the visitors that read the first blog spent 10% more time on your website while interacting more compared to the other visitors.

With this data, you can see what type of content resonates best with your audience and replicate the experience to other blog posts or advertisements, or simply allocate more budget to better-performing content instead.

2. Best channels

Marketing attribution reports will highlight which channels are performing best – and this is not limited to the number of clicks. Depending on your attribution report, you can see how all of your content is working with each other.

Once you can see what channels work, you can adjust your time and strategy to focus on what works. You will also see what’s not working that well and will be able to look into why it isn’t.

Using marketing attribution reports, you can make more informed decisions based on revenue instead of clicks.

3. How revenue changes from each channel/content over time

Trends and what works and what doesn’t may change over time, and so can your best channels or top-performing type of content.

You can notice this shift if you keep track of your marketing attribution.

And, by adjusting your strategies on what works best and allocating your budgets before it gets too late, you can prevent it from being a problem that limits your lead and revenue generation.

4. Full customer journeys

Even if you know which channel drove a lead your way, chances are you can’t track the previous touchpoints of a customer before converting.

You can track individual entries and see their full customer journey with marketing attribution. This includes their touchpoints, which pages or content they engaged with, and when and how they converted into a lead.

If your lead numbers are small, looking through these reports is a good idea to see how your high-value customers found and engaged with your business to replicate the same experience for other potential customers.

5. How long it will take for a customer to convert

Knowing the time it takes for a customer to convert is helpful to know when you want to optimize conversion rates and improve your strategy at the same time.

An attribution report shows you the number of steps your potential customers might take before getting convinced to make a purchase. It will highlight which parts you need to improve for a seamless customer journey to make the conversion process smoother, and more efficient.

Get started with marketing attribution with HockeyStack

HockeyStack is an analytics and attribution tool that lets you collect and analyze marketing, sales, and product data across channels and creates reports to understand what drives the highest quality leads.

Here are some ways it can help you with tracking your marketing attribution:

Shows you every touchpoint of each stakeholder

HockeyStack collects all actions on the website and product automatically. It shows you how many leads dropped out at what stage in its detailed funnels. HockeyStack also allows you to visualize each account’s pre-conversion and post-conversion journey with all touchpoints, including demo calls, website visits, CRM properties, and more.

Measures your SEO efforts

It tracks which pages bring you the most engaged users, ICP customers, and the highest activation rate. It connects pre-signup activities with product engagement to find out the content types that actually bring you active users, not just impressions and clicks.

Measures your social performance

HockeyStack measures each social channel’s effect on your pipeline. It tracks which channels influence the closed won deals, analyzes which pages they land on, and finds out what they do on your website.

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HockeyStack automatically pulls and visualizes your data straight from your product or website and serves it to you in an easily understandable and clear format while having all of your data accessible whenever you want in one place.

Also, it just takes 5 minutes to set up and doesn’t affect your load time at all thanks to its no-code interface.

With the customer journeys of today being as complicated as they are, you will need a proper system in place to effectively manage and leverage your data to your benefit. There are so many channels and content you use for marketing that are nearly impossible to keep track of and report the changes manually. 

A marketing attribution system in place will help you see your data updated in real-time and shows you which type of content or channel offers you the highest return on investment. In doing so, marketing attribution opens a space for your business for growth and development, making it easier for you to see the inner workings of your marketing efforts and see what you need to focus on most.

FAQs:

How do you explain marketing attribution?

Marketing attribution is a strategy to determine which marketing tactics and strategies attribute to higher sales or conversions.

What is the purpose of attribution analysis?

Attribution analysis is used to separate the selection and allocation effects. The selection effect reflects the quality and ability to pick the right securities at the right time. It allows managers to reflect on the entire investment decision-making process and gives them opportunities to improve.