Planning to embark on a marketing attribution solution to consolidate the performance of all your marketing campaigns but unsure about the key steps required for successful execution? As a marketer, understanding the customer journey and the role of different marketing channels is vital. That’s where marketing attribution comes into play, helping to optimize your marketing spend. To aid in your process, we’ve dissected a marketing attribution project into three core queries:
Who’s Steering the Marketing Attribution Efforts Within Your Company?
- Identify the Internal Teams Involved in the Project: Marketing teams such as performance teams (SEA, Affiliation) or branding teams (VOL, TV, etc.), CRM, Analytics, and more might have unique requirements that need to be considered during project implementation. The marketing team needs to use attribution to understand how their various marketing activities contribute to the marketing ROI.
- Identify the External Partners Involved in the Project: If your marketing campaign management is outsourced to agencies, it’s vital to inform them about your decision to change your attribution model and the potential future modifications in management KPIs. It’s also sensible to run a transitional phase, operating both the old and new attribution models. Other direct (like affiliates) or indirect (display media) partners might be involved, especially if their compensation depends on the income attributed to the concerned lever. Notifying all your partners not only facilitates faster adjustment to the new management model but also ensures their commitment, particularly in case of data quality issues.
- Identify the Marketing Attribution Project Manager(s): This key person or team, responsible for centralizing various internal needs and communicating with external teams, is crucial to the project’s success.
What are the Prerequisites and Best Practices for Establishing a Custom Marketing Attribution Model
- Define the Scope: Start by identifying which KPIs and conversion indicators allow you to assess your marketing performance. It’s crucial to determine these elements in advance to ensure the necessary information is available. For example, an e-commerce site will need to attribute sales, but are the product details and amounts technically retrievable from your site? For a lead-generation site, do you have the means to identify a successful lead? Defining the scope in advance facilitates quicker progress during tracking setup, particularly concerning tag configuration and data enrichment.
- Establish Good Media Tracking Practices: Based on the defined scope, ensure that redirect links include keywords to identify each media campaign. It could be the partner’s name, the type of lever (example: Google – Shopping), the funnel stage (example: Online video – Prospecting) or the strategy (example: Retargeting). The importance lies in standardizing nomenclatures to clearly identify traffic sources, which is vital for determining the role of each lever in the conversion paths using your attribution tool.
- Appoint a Dedicated Project Manager: Given that a marketing attribution project is cross-functional, the project manager’s availability and responsiveness are key to centralizing and coordinating operational issues. Their availability will enable quick responses to specific queries via their close contacts with various stakeholders, thereby advancing the project.
What’s the Timeline for Implementing the Right Attribution Strategy Successfully?
The timeline depends on the number of teams and media partners involved, the complexity of the marketing mix to be tracked, and the availability of all stakeholders during marketing attribution tool implementation. Some actions will need quick responses from the IT teams (like tagging all site pages), others depend solely on media partners (like certification time on display networks for first-party tracking post-view measurement) or agencies (like reviewing tracking models on SEA campaigns). While a few weeks (2 to 4) might suffice in some cases, a 2-month period seems more appropriate for complex organizations with more teams and granular monitoring needs.
Effective implementation of an attribution project necessitates centralized communication and sound data collection practices. As data is the cornerstone of your marketing attribution analysis, it provides valuable input for your attribution algorithm. Your marketing data helps you measure marketing attribution and get insights into how marketing campaigns perform across various marketing channels. Thus, understanding of marketing attribution helps to align marketing and sales, ultimately impacting the ROI of your marketing efforts.
Now that you’re equipped with the knowledge about effective marketing attribution, why not see it in action? Wizaly is ready to guide you through the journey. Experience the power of our advanced marketing attribution tools and how they can help you to optimize your marketing efforts across various channels. Schedule a demo with Wizaly today and take your first step towards transforming your marketing strategies.
