Multi-Channel Attribution: How to Track and Measure Your Customer Journey Effectively
According to the Online Marketing Institute, it takes over 7 to 13 touchpoints to get your hands on a qualified sales lead. The modern customer travels across a number of touchpoints before they ultimately convert to a lead or sale. The popularity of digital marketing and multi-channel engagement techniques make it difficult for marketers to track or assign a value to the channel that drives the most sales or leads.
And that’s where multi-channel attribution comes in handy!
What is Multi-Channel Attribution?
If you’re not a marketing expert, you may be wondering what multi-channel attribution is!
Multi-channel attribution is the process of tracking the marketing channels that lead to a sale or conversion. Multi-channel attribution modeling helps marketers assign appropriate value to each marketing channel based on its contribution to the sales cycle.
Multi or cross channel attribution enables companies to allocate an accurate budget to marketing campaigns and measure their effectiveness. Marketers can also plan strategies to increase ROI with a multi-channel attribution model.
Do You Have an Attribution Problem?
Most marketers suffer from an attribution problem. Let’s check out an example..
Let’s say a user come across your pay-per-click ads by searching certain keywords related to your niche. The user visits your website, stays for a few minutes, and then decides to compare prices and specifications with your competitors. Then the user gets distracted by other things and forgets about their search.
A few days later, your remarketing ad catches the attention of the same user while they were reading an article. Now the user directly searches your company and visits your website again. They may also search for ratings and reviews of your company on other platforms. They also browse your social media accounts and get redirected to your site, where they finally signs up for your newsletter.
As a marketer, you should be able to track and assign a value to each channel to enhance your campaigns and budget. So whether you have an advertising attribution problem or a channel attribution problem, multi-attribution tracking is your solution.
How to Find Out if You Have an Attribution Problem
The best way to find out if you have an attribution problem is to ask yourself if you can successfully track and measure each channel that your customer touches. If you can’t, then you surely have issues in attribution.
Here’s another way to find out by using Google Analytics:
- Open Google Analytics
- Navigate to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels Report
- Check out your Path Length report
This report will give you a breakdown of the total number of paths. If you have more than 2 paths, then you have an attribution problem and should make efforts to implement multi-channel model attribution.
There’s one limitation of using the multi-channel attribution Google Analytics reports limited to online channels. You can’t track or measure your offline advertisements or campaigns.
How to Set Up an Effective Cross Channel Attribution
You’ll find many tools like Google Analytics to set up multi-channel attribution for your online channels. These tools will give you complete visibility into each channel and the number of leads or conversions they generate. Then you can focus on the most effective channels and plan your budget accordingly.
So now you’ve taken care of attributing your online channels. But what about those offline campaigns like newspaper ads, billboards, TV ads and such? How do you attribute those offline channels?
The solution to this difficult situation is call tracking. While online tools can attribute online channels, call tracking can be used to attribute both online and offline channels.
Call tracking solutions like CallGear use a technology called dynamic number insertion (DNI) to assign different phone numbers to each channel, advertisement, advertisement copy and keyword. Whenever someone calls the number, you can see which channel or source are generating those calls.
You can also see the complete conversion path taken by your customers before they decide to call your business. Call tracking works for both online and offline campaigns and reveals the combination of marketing efforts generating the most calls and the best quality leads to your business.
Wrapping Up: Multi-Channel Attribution is a Necessity of Modern Marketers
Marketers need a clear idea of the channels that produce the most conversions and sales. Based on that data, they can allocate their marketing budget effectively. You can also focus on the channels that work best for your company and optimize them for more conversions and sales. As a result, your business will earn more profit and grow.
You can also optimize your content to suit the channels your customers use most for a greater appeal. This makes room for efficient budgeting and higher engagement on those channels, ultimately providing a better customer experience.