Welcome To Attribution! (Infographic)

Posted on Sep 3 2013 - 12:08am by Eddie

There is an old saying in marketing that “half of my marketing budget works; I just don’t know which half!” This saying has its origins in the difficulties that marketers everywhere have in knowing what parts of their budget work (generate positive ROI) and what parts don’t! Marketers will often run multi-channel campaigns on radio, TV, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Leads and sales are generated but knowing which medium generated which sale has always been a challenge. Things are further complicated by the wide-scale proliferation of media and that many new customers will have been impacted by several touch points before actually deciding to become a customer.

Let’s take a fictional company called “A1 Security” that provides security services for example. Suppose that a shopping centre manager is looking for a security company in Dublin. He will likely Google “security services Dublin” and perhaps click on a pay per click advert that A1 are running. He browses their site but doesn’t call them just yet as his phone rings and he needs to tend to some other issue. He forgets about this for a while until while browsing the net, he again sees and advert for A1 as A1 are running a remarketing campaign on Google’s display network. He sees the ad’ but doesn’t click on it but does think “o ya, I’ve got to call those guys.” That night, he is at home browsing Facebook and again sees an ad’ for A1 as they are also remarketing on Facebook.

He clicks on the ad’, again browses the site for a bit and decides to call them first thing the following morning. In the morning he Googles “A1 Security” and clicks on the top natural result and calls the company. So, the client started his journey by clicking on a Google AdWords advert. Remarketing ad’s on Google’s display network and on Facebook helped things along before the organic visit closed the sale. So which channel gets the credit? In the below infographic, we look to help companies untangle the attribution web in order to get the data that they need to make informed decisions on their marketing mix.

attribution infographic

About the Author

Eddie O’ Driscoll is the managing director of DPFOC UK and Ireland and writes regularly on all topics related to online marketing.