Shout out to Andy Schneider for letting me brainstorm with him!
It’s been a question many of my clients have had, particularly with the announcement of Customer Journey Analytics B2B at Adobe Summit this year: where do I use Marketo Measure vs. other B2B analytics tools?
It’s important to understand that attribution is a specific subset of analytics. Analytics, particularly journey-type analytics, focuses on analyzing overall business performance, customer behavior, and marketing campaign effectiveness, while revenue attribution – such as that provided by Marketo Measure - specifically focuses on measuring the impact of individual touchpoints and channels on lead and sales conversions within the B2B customer journey.
B2B journey analytics involves collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data about various aspects of a business, including customer behavior, sales performance, marketing campaign results, and overall business operations. Its goal is to gain insights into customer behavior, identify patterns, optimize processes, and make data-driven decisions to improve business performance.
B2B attribution is the process of measuring the individual contributions of different touchpoints and channels to a conversion within a B2B sales cycle. Its goal is to determine which marketing activities are most influential in driving lead and opportunity conversions and to optimize marketing investments accordingly. You use revenue attribution to gain insights at a channel or campaign level as to which marketing activities led to a sales or generated a lead.
Marketo Measure analyzes all touchpoints throughout a buyer’s journey and then, based on proximity to major milestones in the journey (like first touch, MQL, etc.) assigns attribution. In revenue attribution, not all touches are created equal – the ones that happen right before a major milestone (what we call proximity-based attribution) should have more weight than those that didn’t happen near those major lifecycle events. While general analytics looks at every engagement, Measure focuses on those that are most closely linked to conversions.
This means that within Measure itself, the Discover boards are going to focus on the channels, campaigns and touches that contributed to revenue attribution. It does not drill down into individual leads nor campaigns that didn’t contribute to attribution (though the raw touchpoints are available in its data warehouse and you can use another BI tool connected to it to further drill in, if you like.) You can see this in a dashboard from Marketo Measure shown here. The focus is on what drove revenue milestones and how to maximize return on investment, not every touch in a journey.
Meanwhile, this dashboard from CJA B2B looks at engagement regardless of conversion, to deliver rich insights that may not directly relate to an opportunity in your CRM but can absolutely maximize business performance.
So should you use Marketo Measure or CJA B2B? Why not both? Even before the release of CJA B2B, I advise my clients that Measure is not intended to replace your other analytics tools, but to enhance your analytics tech stack by offering a unique analytics perspective that few tools do well: revenue attribution. But it doesn’t replace Adobe Analytics for analyzing web traffic or social media analytics tool sets, which are similarly designed to do their type of analytics very well.
Okay, I hear you saying, “My budget will only let me pick one this year, Michaela. Which one?”
If you must pick one tool over the other, then think about the insights you’re seeking.
When it comes to paid advertising I:
- I want to understand if my paid advertising campaigns are generating qualified buyers.
- I want to understand how prospects are engaging with my paid advertising campaigns during different parts of the customer journey
When it comes to lead generation I:
- Want to know how many MQLs resulted in won opportunities and from which channels
- I want to know how many MQLs were generated and from what sources
It is very important for us to be able to see a campaign’s engagement even if it didn’t result in revenue.
- No
- Yes
When it comes to return on investment for my marketing campaigns:
- Cost per lead and cost per opportunity is important
- I use other metrics to measure my return on investment
Content marketing analytics is critical:
- I am more interested in my campaign performance vs. specific pieces of content
- Yes, being able to measure the performance of unique content is most important to me
If you answered mostly 1s, then Marketo Measure should be your first analytics investment. If you answered mostly 2s, then I’d recommend you start with CJA B2B. And in both cases, I hope you’ll reach out to Adobe Professional Services so that we help you with your analytics journey!
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