In the August edition of the Fearless Forum, we're diving deeper into the topic of marketing attribution. In a recent challenge on Purple Select, a lot of Marketo users signaled they struggled with proving marketing's impact to their organization. In order to shed some light on how the experts are successfully proving their marketing impact everyday, we asked Libby Koebnick of PitchBook to help us understand how she's leveraging Marketo + Bizible.
Q1: Can you describe how marketing attribution works at your organization?
Web visits and form fills are captured via Bizible’s tracking scripts, and offline activities, including prospecting, are tracked via Salesforce activities. Our model takes all these touchpoints, connects them to and normalizes them in the buyer journey, and attributes a percentage of revenue back to them. This allows us to see how marketing and sales are contributing to our bottom line.
Q2: How did you manage your marketing attribution efforts before implementing Bizible?
Before Bizible, we were using a siloed last touch attribution model. This means we would attribute an entire contract to a single action of a single individual on that account. Since we’re a B2B SaaS Company with enterprise subscriptions, that model doesn’t make much sense for us. Now we use a custom Bizible attribution model that takes into account all the touchpoints of all the individuals involved in the conversation of the sale.
Q3: Can you share a specific benefit you’ve seen from implementing marketing attribution?
Our Bizible attribution models have showed us that over half our potential clients’ early interactions with us are via pitchbook.com. Citing this data, we successfully petitioned leadership for the resources to redesign our entire website.
Q4: How do you use Bizible with Marketo?
The way we get Bizible to see Marketo campaigns is to tag all the links in our emails with UTMs that Bizible will parse out when it captures landing pages from web visits. We just have to make sure all our links direct to our website or other pages that have the Bizible tracking script on them.
Q5: What are some unique ways you’re using Bizible with Marketo?
We started using in-platform forms in social media, which are super effective, but they don’t allow us to add Bizible tracking scripts. We found a workaround by using a Marketo campaign triggered by the form fill that creates a Salesforce activity task with the appropriate medium, source and campaign values. Bizible then turns those activities into touchpoints under the correct channel and subchannel.
Here's a closer look at how Libby leverages a campaign trigger in Marketo to turn activities into touchpoints in Bizible:
Q6: What was the most challenging part of choosing/implementing/building out your attribution model?
The most challenging part is getting our entire organization to correctly and consistently use UTMs. Web visits are bucketed into channels by building rules around landing page UTMs. Every time someone uses a new UTM (such as a new channel) or has a typo in their link, I have to create a new rule in Bizible.
Q7: How did you decide on the particular attribution model you’re using?
We are using Bizible’s Full Path model that attributes 22.5% of the revenue to each of the following buckets:
1) First touch
2) Lead creation
3) Opportunity creation
4) Close
The remaining 10% is attributed to the other touchpoints prior to the closed deal. Our old last touch attribution model was attributing 100% to the opportunity creation touchpoint. The Bizible model gives us context to the sale, more like account based marketing. We can see how the account first learned about PitchBook, how we warmed them up over time, and what eventually contributed to the win.
Q8: What advice would you give to Marketo users who are considering more advanced attribution?
Start collecting Bizible touchpoint data now! Bizible will naturally collect touchpoints, so by the time you’re ready to build your model you’ll already have your data. It takes a long time to build up historical data, and you don’t need an attribution model to start tracking touchpoints.
No attribution model is going to be completely right or wrong, and you can always adjust as you go. The model we went with was the most logical, considering our sales process, and the output passed the gut check.
When you put it all together, here's what attribution data looks like in Bizible Discover:
We hope you enjoyed reading about how PitchBook is setting themselves up for success when it comes to proving their marketing impact. For even more tips and tricks on best practices, check out our brand new edition of the Fearless Forum which features a special video by Marketo Champion Juli James!
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