It’s hard enough to get marketing strategy implemented. So why is attribution reporting a key measure? For 3 main reasons. The first is to determine which of your campaigns is working in comparison with others. The second is to understand what specific promises customers are responding to. And the third is to assign credit to all members of a team who have contributed to making the sale, or the deal, happen.
It's usually sales teams that get the lion’s share of success. And their frontline presence is a big factor. However, the marketing team’s role in crafting strategies that get the best leads, the creative that helps to draw more customers in and the campaigns that convert also deserve credit.
That’s where HubSpot’s attribution reporting tools help to map out what’s happening on customer journeys and where campaigns have connected to speed things up or convert earlier. That becomes a learning to be implemented and cut the time or stages required for conversion.
Why attribution reporting is necessary
A customer does not make the decision to purchase based on one or two interactions with a brand or an advertisement.
When a company deploys several routes to getting in front of the customer, right from landing pages to social posts or emails as well as the pages on the company site, figuring out the journey and which touch points are important becomes an enormous task. Determining these interactions to maximize ROI becomes the objective.
Attribution reporting is a deep dive into what works with customers to drive interest and generates revenue for the company.
Even then, plotting customer journey can be hard, and finding a more sophisticated way to measure what channels and assets play an important role is like applying filters. That’s why marketers from large companies rely on deeper analysis.
Attribution reports assign credit to the various touchpoints in the conversion path. It helps marketers understand trends and the journey that someone takes from the first interaction on a company website to the time they become a customer. The influence that drives conversions reveals a pattern.
The value of an attribution report is to pinpoint the marketing efforts that led to a conversion. That helps to make better-informed decisions about where to invest your time and resources.
Putting attribution reports in place also drives marketing plans for the future. With data over a longer period, the time taken to convert and the stages involved help companies to determine cycles where demand and consumption goes higher.
Dive into the new additions to attribution reporting within HubSpot
This is where you determine what interactions drive conversion and revenue
Which asset type drove the most deals or which asset type helped bring in the most revenue? This attribution reporting has been around but HubSpot has now built two new models.
The J-shaped model gives 20% credit to the first interaction and 60% credit to the last interaction before the closed won deal, with the remaining 20% spread out across the other interactions in the conversion path.
The attribution report needs to reflect industry norms and customer behavior. It could differ for different brands in B2B, depending on their sales cycles
The inverse J-shaped model gives 60% credit to the first interaction and 20% to the last interaction before the closed won deal, with the remaining 20% spread out across the other interactions in the conversion path.
There are several additional filters available and you can add your own custom filters based on your sales and marketing processes that you think are important. You can determine which interactions are important and at each stage, you can turn on and off interactions that are available for experimentation and to expand the possibilities.
This is dependent on the media you use as well as the way business development happens in your industry. It can be fine tuned to reflect the realities and track them.
Create assets and manage them in HubSpot to build the foundation for attribution reporting
Setting up attribution reporting involves setting up the assets potential customers will interact with. This includes website pages, landing pages, contacts imported into the HubSpot CRM, blog posts in HubSpot, meetings set up and logged in HubSpot, knowledge articles, social posts published through HubSpot, sales emails, all the ads scheduled and released through HubSpot, conversations recorded with customers, all integrations as well as pages being hosted externally.
The wider and more points on the web these assets are, the better the ability to determine customer interaction points.
That’s one of the reasons it makes sense to handle the entire set of marketing activities from HubSpot. Right from sending email sequences to setting up calls and meetings as well as managing the social media calendar.
The wide range of interaction possibilities and the points where customers interacted become the source of your information for reports generated from HubSpot.
There are a wide range of attribution models HubSpot provides and each of these can be calibrated to reflect the industry norms.
For example, in some industries, the first meeting becomes crucial and shapes the way the rest of the conversion process plays out.
In others, it is uniformly distributed along the path of conversion. It may even help to find out where exactly your business model fits. Sometimes, the attribution path may not be clear and you may not be able to determine the way in which the conversion process plays out in the beginning.
Over time, however, it becomes far clearer and then, the marketing activities as well as budgets can be aligned to those parameters.
To work out how attribution reports need to be set up in your company, talk to our experienced consultants at Blueoshan and they’ll be able to help. You’ll need to build the assets and deploy them, of course, but the route can be set up.
