Where are you in the evolution?

Where are you in the evolution of tracking your Marketing ROI?

You should know what each dollar in marketing is driving in revenue for the business. If you don’t have a closed-loop with CRM, you’ll want to build that. You should track both offline (call tracking tied to online traffic based on spot-air time (TV) or unique URLs (print) and online (use URL UTMs) and determine the rules for attribution so that your agencies aren’t double counting.

Here is the evolution of attribution methods in my experience:

  1. How did you hear about us? (there are so many problems with this method – consumers really don’t know AND the order of the drop-down (if public-facing) oftentimes skews the result)
  2. First-click attribution (some believe where the customer first heard of you should get all the credit)
  3. Last-click attribution (this is a little better… The last-click gets the credit)
  • Ensure your Google Analytics Goal Funnels are set up properly as soon as possible. Without the paid version of GA 360, this data is only good as soon as you set it up (in other words, you can’t go back in history).
  • Monitor cross-device conversion data to optimize the approp pages.
  • Ensure call-tracking is set up to ensure the offline are also captured for both paid and organic sources of traffic.
  1. Multi-touch attribution and identifying the assists/influencers along the journey
  • Online tools are incorporating assisted conversion data, e.g. Google Analytics and AdWords – https://searchengineland.com/are-you-ready-for-the-attribution-changes-coming-to-google-adwords-292790
  • Advanced modeling: There are models which will take tons of data and identify vehicle performance. I have several friends who do this method.
  • Well-structured testing: Sometimes, the best solution to identifying what’s working vs. not working in a media mix is well-structured tests. You would only want to do this on your biggest questions that impact 20%+ of your annual marketing spend that can’t be understood with your existing data, e.g. if your question is “What is the value of TV?” – You’d have to go dark on TV for 4-8 weeks in select markets and keep everything else constant (and keep several markets as controls.. this is critical).
  • BONUS: SEO Keyword Attribution Returns!! https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-search-console-keyword-attribution-returns/250339/