The time has come within every Marketing Department to take the plunge! Last click attribution or self-identified marketing / referral sources are not sustainable to your organization's growth. Or the growth of the Digital landscape.
Let’s discuss self-reporting or identifying (when you rely on a customer to say how they heard of your brand) of a marketing source, as a way to attribute conversion credit and judge campaign effectiveness (and ROI of campaigns). This does not and will not work…at least not effectively. First, there’s the annoyance or truthful factor when self-reporting takes place. A lot of room for inaccuracies and errors this way. Secondly, the ability to provide some of the credit to other sources is eliminated or not possible (unless you let customer list all the ways they heard or learned about your brand, but then we run into a first touch issue). Define opportunities on how your organization can more effectively track the referral source (or sources), outside of the older school methodology to self-report.
As far as attribution and crediting sources for KPIs or Goals, there needs to be an agreed upon strategy across the organization for how this will be measured. It’s not an accurate methodology to only credit one source (first click or last click) unless that’s truly the case with only one touch driving to the conversion point.
Choosing which attribution model is best for your business is tricky. There are different models and there is the consideration of timing (how long of a window do you look back when providing credit to a source). Both of these should be discussed before a plan is implemented.
Once your company begins to report in this manner – beware! Metrics and numbers will change, and in some cases it could be drastic (to be expected). This is especially important to note when conducting historical analysis or trending comparisons.
The time is now to make these changes … 2019 is right around the corner and support is available.
