As a marketer, you know how important it is for your messaging to resonate in the cost-conscious climate COVID-19 has created. A novel and highly efficient way to make this happen is with attribution modeling.
As defined by Call Rail, attribution modeling is a process that lets you break down and assign credit to various key touchpoints that happen during a customer journey. Which initial touchpoints are key to incorporate in the attribution modeling process?
Online product searches.
Obviously, if you are measuring importance is terms of what your customers are looking for, you need to go to the source of what brought them to your site or platforms in the first place. Getting down to the nitty-gritty details of that spark of consumer interest is of huge value to your brand strategy.
The specific questions consumers have asked about the specs of a product you offer.
Break down the interactions your current and potential customers have initiated via live chat on your company website. Whether those consumers actually chose to subsequently click the "buy" button, in terms of the emotional and financial considerations that seal a purchase, can be figured out based on the details they got regarding your product.
Once you've determined a consumer's intention — and whether what you've got to sell met their needs and expectations — you can start to analyze if your content and information outlets are hitting the mark in terms of generating sales. According to Convince and Convert, attribution modeling helps you understand which channels and campaigns are truly earning the credit for the conversions you see on your website.
Through the process, you break down what parts of a launch really appealed to a consumer or tribe, for example. You can also determine how effectively individual aspects of your social media outreach are performing on their own.
Is your Instagram feed getting less traffic than you'd like in comparison to your Twitter engagement? Through attribution modeling, you can figure out how tailoring sales messaging to an individual platform may be doing your products justice, or whether a more uniform content message across all your platforms might garner more sales both in the short and long term.
So, which attribution modeling tools should you use to make this happen? When researching the specific options that might be right for your brand, take a close look at these potentially profitable options:
Tracking through single touch or multi-touch attribution.
If you choose to go with single touch, you award all of the credit to just one click a consumer makes — either the last one that brought them to point of purchase, or the first one, which takes you back to determining why they were originally interested in your product. This approach can be great if you are trying to hone in on specific aspects of your campaign and channel results.
If you choose a multi-touch analysis, you expand your view to be able to track all or most of the stops made on a customer journey. You can then more accurately distribute credit to steps a consumer took to get to their decision. If you're seeking info on a product in a broader sense, you might want to take this route.
Cookies and/or tags.
Of course, you want to use these ethically in terms of protecting individual customer privacy.
Google analytics.
This can be helpful as a limited tool to see what piqued your customer's original interest in your product — again, great if you're focusing tightly on the origins of customer interest in your brand.
Attribution software.
According to Segment, this targeted technology gives you a complete throughline when it comes to the steps any given customer takes online before finally settling on a specific brand's product.
The beauty of attribution modeling as a whole is its immediacy. When you can compare, contrast and study every element of the approach you are using to market your brand, it's instantly apparent what to remove and what to enhance.
