Jani KahukiwaWhat is the number one issue in marketing? ATTRIBUTION, of course!
Our super-strategist, Caden Thompson, dives into the rabbit hole of attribution and shares his strategies and knowledge so marketers can understand how to make informed decisions without solely relying on attribution tools.
Table Of Contents
Understanding Attribution
Since we are delving into the complex topic of attribution, it makes sense to look into how it has evolved. Much has changed over the last 20 years. Marketers were spoiled as the upward trend of getting more and more attribution came to a head only recently. Now the repositioning within marketing shows us that we are again losing attribution.
It’s instrumental to be aware of what this means as a business owner and a marketer. Once you have grasped the concept, it gives you numerous advantages over the competition.
Furthermore, this awareness can help you make informed decisions on the right agency for any business, including understanding which areas you need to focus on. We’re aiming to track the effectiveness of our marketing efforts.
What is attribution?
Attribution is the evaluation of marketing touchpoints that a consumer encounters on the road to purchasing. Sales teams can view the impact made on specific goals such as a lead, conversion, or main action that is being optimized, by reporting these strategies.
As marketers, it’s vital to recognize which area has the most impact so we can turn the funnel into a powerhouse of efficiency. You’re essentially doing detective work, uncovering the specific areas within any marketing plan that guide customers toward desired outcomes.
Let’s observe this simple example. The first touchpoint (A) could be a Meta awareness campaign and the last touchpoint (B) could be a Meta remarketing campaign.
What’s the most efficient path from point A to point B? Our job is to find out!
Control tests give a clear indication of where there is attribution loss. Attribution loss comes from erratic user habits. When we switch up our devices, go from a laptop to a phone to YouTube, the traces of a single ad get ‘lost’.
Algorithms begin to waver and find it near-impossible to track the information because there’s no previous history attached to that user.
Losing Third-Party Attribution Cookies
In Q3 2024, we will all face losing third-party cookies, Google included. App platforms are dealing with this issue head-on, by increasing the touchpoints for the user.
Performance Max is the best example to cite here. As the user goes through the process of hearing about your brand, more instances of remarketing show up as touchpoints. That indicates it has impacted the campaign.
There will be a tendency to pop up multiple times and as it moves toward the end of that conversion window, it’s much easier for the system to claim it as its own, saying, ‘Hey, I got that conversion’.
But what happens when we try to scale the remarketing campaign?
We must ensure there’s sufficient brand awareness on the remarketing side of things. The failsafe way to do this is to carry out control tests. If we have a remarketing campaign that appears to be doing a ton of work and we want to lean into it, we scale it up.
If the topline numbers don’t increase, we might see that we’re paying more for marketing, new customers are not coming in, and our ROAS is not improving. There’s an underlying issue that needs to be resolved.
Any agency worth its weight should be ferreting out this information. If an agency doesn’t look into the issue, there’s no escaping the effects of loss of attribution. As a business owner, it will be apparent you are not making money.
Control testing is the best way to work out where the problem is. It requires a certain amount of campaign savvy but we assure you that it can be managed without the use of an attribution tool.
Systematically, you need to scale without affecting any part of the funnel. The goal is to look for trends to ascertain whether it has had a positive or negative effect on the scale.
ATTRIBUTION PLATFORMS ARE NEVER GOING TO GIVE YOU THE FULL STORY.
Mastering the skill of control tests allows you to reassure your client that you are not uselessly scaling campaigns willy-nilly. We are determining the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of a campaign. Driving profit to our client’s business is all the proof you need of a campaign going in the right direction.
Omnichannel And The Crossover Nightmare
Omnichannel is where marketers find themselves in deep water. So much tracking is lost in the crossover from one platform to another. It’s very easy for a business to scale a Performance Max campaign and then give credit to Google Ads simply because it’s at the end of its action.
Good numbers at the end of a funnel do not guarantee a positive impact on your business. On the contrary, it can be detrimental. In the beginning, it may seem like a good idea to simply scale bottom-of-funnel.
The first consequence is to lose money. Your immediate reaction is to make some cuts. When Meta or YouTube aren’t showing much of a ROAS, it’s easy to cut your losses and get rid of them.
Reducing marketing spend will look good for a day or two. Then all hell breaks loose. The audience begins to shrink and no more users will move into your bottom-of-funnel. That will ruin your business.
Solutions 8 has moved into the omnichannel realm because our extensive experience in Google Ads has taught us not just Google Ads but how omnichannel efficiency works and we want to leverage that skill set versus bottleneck our services.
As a marketer, make sure you do control tests and take a good hard look at cold traffic, and that includes what’s feeding the funnel itself, not just what looks good within an app.
Alternatively, you may find it useful to scale the bottom-of-funnel more.
A simple example: If a company has brand awareness steadily building up, we could scale that to get longer-form messaging into it. People may have heard of the brand but they are not always clear on what the company does or provides.
As we locate all those different areas of efficiency, we identify the ratio of top-of-funnel to bottom-of-funnel. Seventy percent at top-of-funnel, 20% at middle-of-funnel, and 10% at bottom-of-funnel shows how much room we’ve got to move. The percentages vary from business to business, and sector to sector.
The advantage Solutions 8 has is our extensive experience with a range of different marketing channels and in working with so many different businesses over numerous years. Correlating past statistics shows how we can use that information as a solid base to make wise decisions in specific niches.
That level of market insight can guide us toward leveraging campaigns with the utmost efficiency. This is more of a tendency not a rule, but it holds us in good stead when offering our clients the best.
REMINDER: Use control tests to find out where the impact is coming from to build a funnel for any business. It’s as easy as that.
