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When it comes to reporting marketing data, there’s a lot to consider in terms of success and shortcomings. You may have even found yourself closely analyzing metrics to uncover hidden patterns or inconsistencies in your data. To help track the progress of your company’s marketing and sales teams, marketing attribution is a strategy your company should be considering. Here’s what you need to know about marketing attribution and how to use it effectively.
First, let’s define marketing attribution
According to HubSpot, marketing attribution can be defined as a reporting strategy that can bring marketing and sales teams clarity into the outcome of their marketing materials and strategy. It helps your company establish a connection between a final sale and the marketing efforts and assets that led to it. If your company has frequently been blogging or running an email marketing campaign, you would want to keep track of specific metrics behind these assets, such as:
- Email open and click-through rate
- CTA downloads related to the email or blog
- Blog bounce rate and session duration
- Additional webpages a user viewed after the blog post
How to effectively use a marketing attribution report
A marketing attribution report can be defined as a way to closely analyze the sales journey of a user—from their first time on your website until the conversion into a customer. This report gives your teams insight into the steps that brought a user to the conversion stage. As a result, you will know which specific part of their sales journey led them to convert—and the marketing materials that encouraged them!
To effectively use a marketing attribution report, you will first want to determine which areas to focus on. You may not be able to gather all the data you need with one report alone. For example, the marketing attribution report you would use to measure interactions across multiple pages leading up to conversion will differ from the report used to analyze the actual conversion point itself. Here are some touchpoints you may want to look into with your analytics reporting:
- What was the first page a user visited when they initially came to your website?
- How are users typically coming to your website? Is it organically, from social media, or perhaps unclear and tracked as direct traffic.
- What content on your website are most users downloading to become a lead?
- How much time has passed since a new lead re-visited your website? What pages are they viewing when they come back?
Once you have all the right information from your marketing attribution report, you will be able to closely assess the strength of your marketing and sales strategy. Ask yourself, is your team seeing enough lead conversions from the amount of marketing materials you’ve developed and shared? Are users consistently dropping off from your website on the same page? What key performance indicators (KPIs) have been reached in your latest marketing campaign? These questions can be a good place to start if you’re having trouble interpreting your marketing attribution report.
Now that you have the right insights for your marketing and sales teams to implement marketing attritiubition reporting, it’s time to get started. For additional marketing strategies from thinkdm2, you can check out some of our recent blog posts or contact us today for help with your marketing attribution plan. Thinkdm2 is a New Jersey digital marketing and branding agency that specializes in the professional services and technology industries.
