Attribution. A short guide.

You would probably want to know which ad generated a sale!

But what if you wanted to know; exactly when the customer started getting interested in buying, how long they decided to explore the market, whether they nearly went to a competitor or which exact section of your website made them decide buy your product.

There can potentially be hundreds of digital touch-points in the online buying journey. Google searches, browsing online stores and even researching a product on YouTube, everything you do online, right up to making the purchase, is of interest to data loving marketers, and for a very good reason.

Traditional online attribution software works with ‘last- or first-click attribution’ which isn’t always logical or helpful. It can result in misunderstandings and a lot of wasted marketing budget. The glass of water before bed, after a night of heavy drinking, isn’t necessarily the cause of the hangover. Consumer are extremely complex, even more so when spending money.

Google are investing heavily in attribution beyond first-click and last-click, but it’s a very hard puzzle to solve. Especially with high-priced items like cars and homes, a customer will likely dip in and out of the online funnel, visiting a car showroom or walking into an estate agents.

Equally, we can easily walk away from a big decision after months of research if a salesperson does not answer the phone quickly or we don’t like the way they are answering our questions.

Choices or actions are not simply the result of the previous interaction but the result of a build-up of knowledge made over hours, days, weeks or months. To make life even more challenging we do not all assimilate knowledge in the same way or apply the same rules to each piece of data.

This means that no two sales journeys are the same!

The future of digital marketing?

There is a vision of full marketing automation, funnelling all leads through an engine that generates a personalised response based on each customer’s contact information covering offline and online plus all of their demographic information and transactional history.

Armed with all this great data you can now tailor your communication to perfectly match the needs of each customer. It should result in higher conversion and much higher satisfaction levels. However this has its own issues.

As we delve further into the internet/digital age, we are all becoming far more aware of our online privacy and security. An ad too personalised could be extremely off-putting to some people. Not to mention you would have to create this super-software and it would not be cheap.

Truly great marketing should engage customers take them on a journey. It should give information, ask questions and pre-empt issues before they become obstacles to the sale. Data shows consumers want a real service from a real person, especially for high-ticket items.

Spenders want someone to politely provide answers quickly and truthfully. In-market customers are 300% more likely to call than complete a web form, send emails or engage in a web-chat. So make sure your business is optimised for the phone and not just digital channels, even if it seems the modern thing to do.

So how should you invest your marketing spend?

Any form of attribution will see you investing in the tactics or channels that have the biggest impact. That makes sense, but what happens when you only see a small part of the whole customer journey? You could be doing things quite inefficiently, but think you’re acing it!

No business can rely on decisions based upon gut-feelings and the only solution is real sales data generated by call tracking.

Where Calltracks can help…

It is important to keep searching for the best ways to manage and control customer communications. The best place to start is to plug the gaps between the online and offline customer journey by managing your phone calls far better. Central databases and a clear understanding of the customer journey is vital, along with some brand personality and values.

At Calltracks we have developed solutions to improve the impact of your online marketing investment and to stop all those lost, fumbled or missed calls.

Calltracks could double sales without increasing your marketing spend and take very little time to implement. If your business is not measuring phone call enquiries, you are only getting part of the story. Calltracks can show you the full picture. Let’s talk!