The Secret to Revenue Attribution

Modern marketing organizations are in a race to adopt best of breed technologies to help improve the performance and automation of their marketing activities. We need to optimize budgets, identify and capitalize on trends or product correlations, and ultimately attribute how all of the dollars we’re spending are impacting sales. An advanced analytics platform is the centerpiece of all of these activities, but even still the revenue attribution is where problems arise for most of us.

We gather vast amounts of data from all of platforms that we use to engage with customers: web, digital, social, e-commerce, CRM, marketing automation, perhaps even inventory and logistics data… the list goes on. The thought of trying to figure out how to weight and attribute revenue to one or more of those campaign sources is seriously daunting to most people. But don’t worry, we’ve got some tips to help you avoid the headache.

We’ve been working with our partners at The Pedowitz Group for a couple years now, and have learned that the biggest mistake most marketers make is not in the attribution model. The secret is actually to pay more attention to how you record campaigns and contacts within the CRM or ERP systems, and THEN establish your attribution model.

These are the three guidelines that The Pedowitz Group always gives their customers:

1. Record all contact interactions within each marketing initiative.
2. Associate known contacts with opportunities in your CRM.
3. Weight the valued marketing interactions fairly.

So you can see that the attribution modeling is really only ⅓ of the exercise. The model is important though, and there are a number of frameworks that you can tweak to fit the context of your organization.