December 3, 2021 / Joe Gonsalves

Multi-Channel Attribution: The Assist is Greater Than The Goal

The evolution of digital marketing is driving smarter technology and methodologies to understand how successful our marketing efforts are. It’s no longer about knowing the last action of your customer prior to conversion, but rather about understanding each and every touch point throughout the funnel which led them to convert.

The best analogy I’ve heard was from Christoph Janz of the venture capital firm Nine Point Capital who described Multi-Channel Attribution analysis using a soccer game. It’s not about rewarding the player who scored the goal, but rather about crediting all the players that made passes prior to the goal.

Giving 100% credit to the last touch point prior to the conversion negates the value of all the other touch points. Understanding the importance of each channel and its contribution to the conversion allows digital marketers to optimize their marketing efforts and ultimately improve their marketing ROI.

Knowing all the touch points in the sales funnel is vital to understanding how the ball got into the scorer’s hands. Did the first Facebook ad the customer saw lead to a conversion? Or was it the retargeting display ad?

Did the customer sign up, though they didn’t complete a purchase? Perhaps, they converted after receiving an email. Or was it a promoted tweet that encouraged them to click through to your site and complete the purchase?

How valuable is the Facebook ad compared to the last click of the promoted tweet? How do you reward the players if you don’t know how many players touched the ball?

As a digital marketer, it’s important to have granular actionable data from the services you’re using. You want to know all about the customer journey and not just the final touchpoint before they converted. Understanding not only the data provided by the services you use, but also if the service provides you data that can ID the user in one capacity or another should be a priority.

When reviewing all the data it’s important to prevent it from becoming too noisy. When you’re using multiple service providers getting continuity in the data can become a heralding task. There needs to be a common thread running through the data, for example, the ability to identify users by IP address.

An analytics platform like ClickMeter can easily consolidate the reported data from multiple services by using tracking links. This way all your reports can be presented in one format.

Why is the data so important? It’s the classic chicken or egg scenario; you can’t have smart results without smart data. This puts intense pressure on the reporting of the services and the cohesion of the data being reconciled and reported. It’s not just about the data, but the relevance of the data in regards to the ability to pair visitors and customers throughout the funnel.

ClickMeter is a great platform to not only consolidate digital marketing reporting across multiple platforms but also to provide consistent data reporting that can be easily incorporated into your multi-channel attribution analysis.

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