How RudderStack Makes Decisions with Multiple Attribution Models

The Who

RudderStack helps data teams collect and use real-time customer data while preserving privacy and security.

Dave Katz is the Vice President of Marketing at RudderStack, where he drives campaigns and strategy for generating brand awareness and high-quality leads.

The Problem

Before implementing HockeyStack’s solutions, RudderStack’s marketing team was gathering reports from multiple systems that had their own attribution models. The team used Salesforce to track down-funnel performance on a first-touch model, but Google and LinkedIn were being optimized on last-touch metrics. 

The biggest problem with this approach was that his team could only view and measure the first or last channel a client interacted with — via a click, impression, or other metric — before converting. In other words, RudderStack’s marketing optimization efforts were limited to seeing a sliver of performance impact of each ad campaign.

“It was really hard to get the level of detail we needed to understand what to optimize, and just generally the attribution was a complete mess,”

Katz says. “Simply making decisions was difficult. We were evaluated based on overall pipeline growth, but optimizing within each system as if people only saw a single ad.”

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The Requirements

RudderStack was eager to work with a data partner who also understood B2B measurement and the necessity of dozens or hundreds of touchpoints. “The B2B focus was really helpful for us because we have to deal with so many interactions within our sales cycle,” Katz says.

Customization was also a main requirement, where they could generate and pull different kinds of reports and have flexibility in how they manipulated data. Finally, Katz was drawn to HockeyStack’s advanced LinkedIn integrations, as that was an important channel for RudderStack to keep tabs on and utilize effectively.

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The Alternatives

RudderStack’s key functionality is in data collection, which helped the implementation process with HockeyStack. Katz’s team compared tools that would benefit from using RudderStack’s historical customer event data and could build attribution models on top of their existing datasets — and HockeyStack provided the best solution in this area compared to other options the team explored.

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The Insights

With HockeyStack, Katz and his team can detect patterns and opportunities through multiple attribution models — and view everything via one platform, rather than jumping between data tools. 

“We are seeing everything aggregated together: understanding the spend, the cost per lead based on the models that we have, and the cost per pipeline generated,” Katz says. “It’s our new single source of truth for attribution.”

They’re also now able to more confidently support bigger decisions, or budgetary allocation and requests. And whenever a major change is made, its positive or negative outcomes can be tracked immediately. “It’s really helpful to see where the pipeline is adjusted, where it gets increased, where our leads are coming from,” Katz says. “So if we scale down the budget in one area and move it up into another, we are seeing that impact fairly quickly within HockeyStack.”

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The Results

RudderStack’s marketing department’s primary attribution model now is position-based, which considers all touchpoints alongside the first and final touchpoints, giving more weight to the latter two. This strategy allows Katz and other relevant stakeholders to go deeper into successful and unsuccessful campaigns to identify lessons and opportunities to iterate.

Using HockeyStack’s insights, RudderStack was also able to smartly reallocate its budget to drive higher returns on ad spend, tripling its attributed pipeline from organic search in the process.

“We reduced budget on Google Ads, but saw a net increase in pipeline driven by both paid Google Ads and organic Google search,” Katz says.

HockeyStack’s dashboards are now a regular fixture in Katz’s workflow — not to mention, conversations he and team members have with leadership or other important decision-makers. “I kick off every marketing team meeting going through it, showing the differences, the changes that we had,” he says. “And also as we think about pipeline generated, especially as we’re shifting budgets around, it’s something that we share with all teams. We use attribution metrics to show the impact of our messaging and marketing decisions.”