How to prepare for multi-touch attribution
A customer goes through an average of almost six touchpoints before converting. This full picture is important because every touchpoint your customers have with your brand influences their decision to convert. Multi-touch attribution helps you understand each touchpoint's role in converting customers and generating revenue.
Multi-touch attribution is a marketing measurement method that accounts for every touchpoint on the buyer's journey and designates credit to each channel based on its effectiveness in driving conversion. With MTA, you can now allocate your marketing spend appropriately. Preparing for multi-touch attribution success involves answering a number of questions.
What Are Your Marketing Goals?
Any marketing attribution effort begins with clearly defined goals. This applies to multi-touch attribution as well. As you set out, you must know what you're aiming to achieve at the end. Defining goals will help you select the most suitable model for your business needs based on the customer journey, which can be complex.
When you clearly set your goals from the start, you are able to:
Understand Which Channels Work Best
Through multi-touch attribution, you learn which channels and marketing tactics drive performance and generate a high ROI. This enables you to make optimizations within these channels and helps with planning and forecasting.
Understand What Campaigns Are Performing
Initially, advertising attribution posed a significant challenge for marketers. Luckily, multi-touch attribution is the answer. After you've set your goals, you know what level of success you need from each marketing campaign. You should be prepared to act on the attribution findings for long-term planning and real-time adjustments to your campaigns.
Understand Your Audience Better
Today's consumer has become pretty adept at avoiding marketing messages. As such, you should set out to understand them better to curate messages and campaigns that resonate with your audience. A survey found that 76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs. Multi-touch attribution offers granular data that enables you to identify audiences across all your channels and determine the specific marketing desires of those users.
Once you completely understand the audience and their needs based on the data collected, you can apply those insights to correct mistakes and create a more customized experience. Improving your consumer experience should always be one of the top goals for your marketing efforts. According to research by Deloitte, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those that aren't.
What Are Your Measurements of Those Goals?
Before you adopt a multi-touch attribution model, you must determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are aligned to your overall marketing goals, which you'll use to assess the success of your multi-touch attribution efforts. Are your efforts driving the desired actions and outcomes? Are the goals you set out to achieve being achieved?
KPIs enable you to see how you are performing, where you are exceeding your expectations, and where you need to make improvements. Most marketers who implement MTA are looking to improve their ROI and user experience, so the metrics that measure the success or failure of MTA must reflect these goals and what they mean for the specific organization.
What Are the Customer Touchpoints Which Your Customers Interact With Along the Way?
Very few customers will make a purchase on their first visit to your site. In most cases, they go through multiple touchpoints before converting. This can include ads, referrals from friends, and reading blogs. For this reason, multi-touch attribution is critically important in spotting effective user acquisition channels.
Multi-touch attribution is most successful when you can incorporate all of the meaningful customer touchpoints into your measurements. It takes account of the cost of each touchpoint and the importance you give it as part of the customer journey. It then compares that relationship to the value it contributes to conversion. With complete visibility of all the touchpoints along the consumer's journey, your teams can make informed decisions for future campaigns.
Implementing multi-touch attribution involves getting all the touchpoints across the devices, channels, and platforms to communicate with each other. This enables your teams to develop holistic marketing campaigns that reflect the buyer's journey.
Final Thoughts on How To Prepare Multi-touch Attribution
You are prepared for more successful multi-touch attribution when you've managed to tie all those factors together. Setting up a multi-touch attribution model takes time and effort to implement and deploy technically. However, the benefits outweigh the cost by far.
You have two options when it comes to implementing a multi-touch attribution model. You can choose to build your own solution or use existing software. Building your solution is very labor-intensive, which is why most marketers choose to go with existing multi-touch attribution platforms.
Attribution is an advanced multi-touch attribution company that empowers marketers with the data they need to convert buyers and maximize ROI. We deliver complete performance visibility with unmatched usability.