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Why marketing attribution is both a challenge and a necessity

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Why marketing attribution is both a challenge and a necessity

When lead-to-account matching specialists LeanData decided to withdraw their marketing attribution solution, one beneficiary was marketing performance measurement platform Full Circle Insights. “A lot of our customers run their routing,” said Full Circle Insights President and CEO Bonnie Crater. “If you have a big sales organization and complex routing issues they have a really nice system.”

What’s more, both LeanData and Full Circle Insights built their offerings natively on the Salesforce platform. “That’s where the system of record is for sales,” Crater said. “When they made that announcement we started getting calls from some of their customers exploring Full Circle, because we are the logical vendor for those customers to move to, because it’s the same philosophy of building on the Salesforce platform. They invested in their routing app and we invested in attribution, funnel metrics and building a system that collects all the digital clicks – a much bigger marketing system. What we can help those customers with is replace their attribution and give them a bit more flexibility around it.”


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Why LeanData retreated from attribution

As the B2B customer journey becomes ever more digital, debate has grown about the viability of traditional attribution modeling, with some calling for a radical rethink of whether it’s any longer possible to use “static metrics” to predict the success of digital touchpoints ahead of time. Did LeanData’s decision to pull out of marketing attribution reflect skepticism about its value? No — but then again, in a way, yes.

“We got into the attribution business really early on,” said LeanData CEO Evan Liang, “primarily because of the lead-to-account matching that we were doing. We had the matching technology and it had been used for two major, distinct purposes. People were using it for routing and some were using it for attribution. It was like two parallel paths.” For LeanData, the routing business was primary. Liang estimates they routed more than 229 million records in the past year. “For us it was the bigger and faster-growing business. Attribution was slower-growing and also had higher churn rates.”

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The decision to move away from attribution was made over a year ago, but LeanData sought to make the transition gradual and smooth for their customers.

Using LeanData’s lead-to-account matching data for attribution purposes made sense. Up to a point. “What we were good at was saying we never miss a touch. Every lead contact will be associated to an account. That problem we solved. The models are simple – that’s math. You want first-touch, last-touch, multi-touch, that’s math. But what you do with this and how you think about what campaigns to run, that’s different.”

LeanData provided visibility into all the touchpoints on the customer journey, but for Liang that’s not the end of the matter. “It’s both the technology and the data,” he said, “and the interpretation and analysis – to me, none of the products, including ours, really makes it easy to tell that story consistently. You almost need a consultancy to do it. You need someone to tell the story. That’s not something we were great at and we weren’t going to build a consulting arm to do that. We knew we were good at getting you the data. The data is accurate, but what story do you want to tell? ‘Tell me what marketing campaigns I should do next year.’ What? We don’t know that. We don’t know enough about your marketing campaigns, and secondly that’s not our expertise.”

Liang’s skepticism turned out to run deeper. “Marketers sometimes want to spin a story regardless of whether the data really supports it or not. A lot of marketers, quite frankly, didn’t want what the data told them; they wanted to tell a different story.”

Why Full Circle Insights is all-in on attribution

Crater paints a much more positive picture of attribution modeling. Referring to the old saying, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half, ” she says: “It’s still true, but we’re getting closer. The systems are way, way better than they were 20 years ago.”

She also makes the B2B customer journey sound relatively straightforward. “What we’ve found is that, for most of our customers, the number of digital touchpoints before the person says, ‘Hey, I want a demo,’ is somewhere between five and 20, and most people are around 10 or 12 – these are B2B companies. The 20 touches are important, but they might have clicked on something and spent 0.5 seconds on that page – so when you build your models you need to be intentional about how you count those digital touches.”

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Brands should start their journey with simple models, she advised. “Don’t get into the weeds right away. Each of the models tell us a different story. A first-touch model tells you how you got that customer at the very beginning of the sales cycle. An even-spread, multi-touch model tells you a bigger story about what happened in the entire sales cycle. A last touch model tells you which of your campaigns is effective just before the customer is filling out a form and are actively saying they want to engage. They don’t fill out the form until they’re really ready. They don’t want to get a call while they’re just poking around.”

The challenge is that prospects who are just “poking around” often don’t identify themselves. That makes it hard to identify the content that had a positive impact on the prospect who ultimately converts. Some vendors –Crater mentioned Demandbase and 6Sense – address this challenge using extensive firmographic data, including business IP addresses.

Read next: Getting back to basics on marketing ROI

ROI and attribution are not the same

Crater had read one of our previous articles on marketing attribution and wanted to demonstrate that ROI and attribution are not the same thing. ROI is a tricky term for marketers, she explained. “ROI is about revenue minus the cost. If you don’t have a good cost number, it’s hard to do ROI and there’s lots of things we do in marketing that don’t really have good cost numbers. For example, a white paper that you wrote five years ago is still doing very well, but it only cost the company $2,500 to create it – is that really the cost, this year? What’s the cost of a web page? These are difficult questions.”

The cost of digital advertising, on the other hand, is easy to quantify. “Finance keeps track of those costs very well,” she said. “But the cost of an individual campaign, that’s pretty tough. Smart people skip that and track it at a much higher level.”

She also wanted to distinguish attribution from funnel metrics. “There are two types of marketing measurement. There’s the attribution, which is impact on pipeline and revenue, but there’s also funnel metrics – and funnel metrics are really important for measuring process. Efficiency in marketing is about your process, especially in a longer, more complex sales cycle. The other piece of attribution is really important for budgeting. It’s for prioritizing campaigns programs or campaign types based on results.”

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Crater not only thinks it’s possible to predict the outcome of future campaigns based on past results. She also thinks it’s necessary. “Everyone needs to measure their marketing.”


About The Author

Are you using no code tools
Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.


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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

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