Marketing Attribution Software

Customers interact with your brand through various channels and touch points—for example, your website, social media, phone calls, online inquiry forms, television commercials, radio ads, and digital marketing channels. But do you know which one of these contributes the most to your sales numbers?

That’s a tough question to answer because a sale or conversion usually involves customers interacting with your business via many of these touch points. Thus, it’s difficult to understand which marketing channel has the highest impact on a customer’s purchase decision and leads to the final sale.

Marketing attribution software assigns credit to customer touch points across marketing channels to determine their influence on conversions. It analyzes data such as customer views, clicks, and actions to determine the impact each touch point has on the final sale. The software commonly integrates with marketing automation, customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce, and email marketing platforms to collect marketing and sales data across the customer lifecycle.

There are many marketing attribution tools available on the market, so choosing the right one for your business can be challenging. In this buyers guide, we provide all the information you need to make a well-informed purchase decision.

Here's what we'll cover:

• What is marketing attribution software?
• Common features of marketing attribution software
• What type of buyer are you?
• Benefits and potential issues
• Market trends to understand

What is marketing attribution software?

Marketing attribution software is a software tool that analyzes large volumes of customer behavior data to identify which touch points led to the sale of a product or service. It assigns credit to any channel or touch point that may have contributed to the conversion based on its influence on customer interactions.

Key functionality of a marketing attribution tool:

• Track multiple marketing and communication touch points, and collect customer interaction data from them
• Monitor the entire purchase journey of customers to identify how they got converted
• Use reports and analytics to check which channels are bringing the highest number of customers

Common features of marketing attribution software

What type of buyer are you?

Understanding the different types of buyers in the market will help you identify your buyer type to make an informed purchase. The majority of buyers belong to the following categories:

• Business-to-business (B2B) buyers: Buyers in this category cater solely to businesses and need software to analyze the impact of their marketing effort on revenue. Their sales cycle is often long, and it can take months to convert a customer, resulting in multiple touch points. They should opt for a tool with account-based attribution to group B2B customers into various accounts and track interaction data to understand which marketing activity is the most ROI-friendly for a particular account.
• Business-to-customer (B2C) buyers: Buyers in this category cater to consumers and generally have a shorter sales cycle than B2B enterprises. They need a tool that can help them understand which marketing impressions are creating the strongest customer awareness and driving online interactions as well as in-store purchases. They should choose a fully featured marketing attribution solution to find different ways to optimize the customer experience.

Benefits and potential issues

Let’s take a look at the benefits as well as potential issues of using a marketing attribution tool:

Benefits

• Higher brand engagement: An attribution tool helps your marketing team track and identify channels customers are using the most to engage with your brand. You can discard the ineffective channels and focus more on building visibility through channels most frequented by customers. This will lead to better audience engagement and higher chances of conversion.
• Better tracking of customer lifetime value: The software offers capabilities to help estimate how much value a buyer will bring to your business during their tenure as a paying customer. These insights help plan how much you should spend on retention for different customers. They also help differentiate one-off buyers from customers more likely to become repeat buyers.

Potential issues

• Incorrect attribution tracking due to the use of multiple devices: In today’s digital world, customers have multiple devices via which they can research and evaluate products, connect with the sales team, and then make a purchase. And these actions can be done from any location—be it home, vacation, or work premises. But not all customer devices are supported by marketing attribution tools, which may result in incorrect attribution.
• Challenges posed by data regulations: Strict data regulations can make it difficult for companies to track customer data. They have to get permission from customers to track the purchase journey, and some customers may not want to share their details. This can affect the insights generated by the attribution tool, given not all touch points would be considered for analysis.

Market trends to understand

Here’s a marketing attribution software market trend to keep in mind when making your purchase:

• Growing demand for AI-enabled marketing attribution software. With a rise in the use of analytics and AI, marketing attribution software vendors are deploying AI at the core of their platforms to enable seamless data collection, analysis of touch points, instantaneous insights, and channel-specific recommendations. AI-enabled attribution platforms can help businesses identify whether there are any breakdowns or gaps in their marketing campaign.

Note: The application selected in this article is an example to show a feature in context and is not intended as an endorsement or recommendation. It has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.