The one-stop solution to create brand awareness and increase Return On Investment (ROI), conversions, and sales is an efficient digital marketing campaign. Marketers need data on their customer journey—specifically about how customers engage with the business, its digital touchpoints, and the entire sales conversion flow until they make a successful purchase.
Marketing attribution software does just that. It provides data on the customer journey from the first marketing campaign the customer interacted with and how they converted into a paying customer.
But not all marketing attribution tools are the same. In this post, you will learn:
Let's dive in!
Marketing attribution software is a tool that provides data on which campaign landing page, ad, or marketing channel had the most impact on the ROI of your business or brought the best results.
Marketing attribution has become the most crucial part of digital marketers' work lives because a well-optimized marketing campaign needs data on how channels and digital touchpoints are doing and how your customers interact with them.
For example, if you are a newly launched SaaS business and want to attract customers via marketing ads, you'd most likely run ad campaigns on each social media channel. You can make these ads more effective by identifying which one of the social media channels contributes the most to your overall ROI and campaign effectiveness. Marketing attribution software will help you with that.
With an attribution tool, you can determine which channels lead to a successful purchase. You can also determine which channels are not successful—saving you time and money.
According to a survey by Think with Google, 76% of all digital marketers say that they currently have, or will have in the next 12 months, the capability to use marketing attribution. The survey was conducted in 2017, and the industry has grown immensely since.
So, if you plan on running marketing campaigns without an attribution tool, be aware that your competitors are likely using one. Though, yes, you can still get good results without attribution software, those results will cost you much more than your competitors are paying.
With good marketing attribution software, you can look at real-life buying behavior and analyze what is working and what's not. So, you can:
Though several attribution tools are available in the market, you must be specific and selective about the tools you use. Not all tools can help you bring the best results.
So, here are some important characteristics of good attribution software that you should consider.
When making an investment, you must consider what type of attribution model the software is working on. There are three types of marketing attribution, including:
Each type of software provides a different kind of data for different touchpoints. So, it is important to clearly understand what type of data you need and the method of attribution of the selected software.
Attribution tools help you differentiate fraudulent traffic from genuine customers. Fraudulent traffic drains advertising resources by using it on fake users with zero return value.
A good attribution tool helps you identify the source of this fraudulent traffic to eliminate it as soon as possible. With this data, you will also be able to identify the effectiveness of a campaign and the reason for low campaign ROI.
For better analysis, marketers need a broad view of attribution data. If the tool doesn't show all important data metrics in one dashboard, then there is no point in having one.
A good attribution tool displays all data in one dashboard with links to a more descriptive view of each data type. This clear visibility promotes a better understanding of data leading to better analysis and better-informed decisions.
Some of your daily visitors won't make a purchase or convert into customers. Some traffic is bound to bounce from your website or ad.
Your attribution tool should provide data on why and when your leads decide to move on without making a purchase. This will help you add more value to the traffic-losing step or re-target your bounced traffic.
Data analysis and campaign structuring take enough time to occupy your entire marketing team. If your attribution tool requires you to code, it will burden your team. The best solution is to use a no-code or codeless attribution tool that makes things easy.
A thorough view of each marketing channel's performance is only possible when you closely look at its analytics. Though your marketing attribution tool should present data well, it should also integrate with other platforms so you are free to use your data how you'd like to.
Integrating it with your social media channels and other analytics platforms like Google Analytics will help you extract more Business Intelligence (BI) insights.
Now that you know more about marketing attribution software, here are five marketing attribution software options available in 2022.
Triple Whale measures and analyzes your first-party data, giving you more control over how to plan your marketing campaigns for better conversions and ROI.
With Triple Whale, you can access customer journey data, top-performing ads, and insights into your customers' buying and spending behaviors. These details are easily accessible through a single, easy-to-view dashboard, and you can generate reports with a few clicks.
Additionally, Triple Pixel PRO lets you record changes to track and understand how they affect your business.
You can pull customers' data and behavioral journeys at each touchpoint to identify what's worth more investment. With this data, you can better plan your marketing campaigns, increase conversions, and boost ROI and Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) immensely.
Ruler Analytics is a closed-loop marketing attribution tool that gives you access to your conversions and revenue data in a single dashboard. It is a multi-channel attribution tool that extracts customer journey data from multiple marketing channels and updates accordingly.
Once a customer makes a successful purchase, Ruler Analytics distributes the total revenue to all channels. It helps you determine which channel contributes the most to the final conversion.
With Ruler Analytics, you can determine your ROAS and identify which campaign, channel, and keywords helped you close the sale with a better understanding of the customer journey from all configured digital touchpoints.
Branch.io is a channel attribution tool that allows marketers to measure the impact of each digital touchpoint by assigning credit to it. It gives you a unified view of your cross-channel and cross-platform marketing campaign to measure their overall impact.
With Branch, you can easily extract data on customer journeys. It lets marketers connect customer touchpoints from every marketing channel with details of conversions on any platform. This data helps you identify when one user appears in multiple places, interacts, and makes a purchase.
You can integrate Branch with your marketing channels to get detailed data on the customer journey. This will help you serve your customers well with a better customer experience on each platform.
Furthermore, You can track ad attribution and referral attribution and measure email, web, and social campaign success.
Neustar is a multi-touch attribution tool that provides you with data on the customer journey. It helps you better understand which channels contributed the most to your overall campaign's success and how customers interacted through each touchpoint.
Neustar also gives you predictive insights to determine the impact of any change to your plan on the results. With it, you can get complete data on your customers' online and offline activities and which channels they use.
With Neustar, you will also receive recommendations on efficient marketing tactics to help you influence your customers and their buying decisions with the right channel at the right time. This real-time re-optimization feature will help boost your ROI and ROAS without much experimentation.
Part of Google Cloud, Looker is a marketing analytics tool that helps you bring all of your marketing data from different tools and platforms together in a single dashboard. It centralizes your marketing data to help you focus on key factors and visualize a bigger picture.
With Looker, you can deep dive into your customer's journey and buying behavior. Looker helps you combine multiple data sets and customer behavior across different channels and platforms and lets you segment your customer data based on different attributes to improve your understanding of your target audience.
As a digital marketer, you can use Looker to track KPIs, do an ROI analysis, create customer email notification alerts, do cross-channel attribution analysis, and optimize conversion rates. You can also track the origin of new customers and create data segmentation to see how each segment behaves over time.
Marketing attribution is a smarter way of planning digital marketing campaigns for a better ROI and higher conversions.
With a better look at the customer journey and a big picture view of your marketing data, you can determine which platform contributes the most to your marketing campaign's success.
Data-driven attribution, backed by machine learning, helps you understand how different touchpoints impact conversions in a customer journey. This makes it easy to identify the best-performing platforms and channels and helps you reshape your campaign strategy while saving your marketing budget.
Triple Whale is a marketing attribution tool that centralizes data from all channels, tools, and platforms in a single dashboard. It gives you a better insight into your business finances, ROI, and ROAS and helps you learn about your customer's behavior.