Attribution for brand awareness campaigns?

[Matt_Stone2]

I'm curious how folks are attributing leads back to non-lead gen activities. For instance, if we wanted to track the impact of our PR, how could we trace these back? Press releases might push people to our site, events, etc, but unless we gave them dedicated landing pages for everything, how would you know?

[Pierce_Ujjainw3]

This is where you need a good lead source strategy.

In your example, you could insert leadsource=pressrelease into any URL in your press release that directs people to your site. By doing this, when the person hits your website (assuming you have a cookie to capture it) that lead source will get stored into a cookie, and called upon whenever they fill out your Marketo form (assuming you have a hidden field there).

This is the best way to give credit to advertising sources, whether its press releases, google adwords, banner ads, online sponsorships, you name it. It is by far the most flexible way to give success to these sources without having to create dedicated pages for each source.

Some people will also setup programs that say if a lead is created with the lead source of 'Press Release' then add the person as a member of that program. That's how you get full closed loop reporting.

Hope that helps. Feel free to email me if you want to talk more about this: pierce@revenuepulse.com

[Josh_Hill13]

Pierce is right.

The goal is to track the Offer and the Channel. In your case, the Channel is Media and your Offer is Press Release. You can construct the URL like

http://info.mysite.com/page?leadsource=press-firm&offer=press-release

[Matt_Stone2]

So in essence, if a press release directs people to www.mysite.com/?source=PR and I cookie the source value so it'll follow that user around until it expires or they convert.

My current lead source strategy has been to consider the source as the where and the lead source detail as the what. So it was more of, if a white paper is downloaded via the website, the source = website, detail = white paper. And likewise, if that white paper was downloaded via a PPC landing page, source = PPC, detail = white paper.

So to that, I guess the question is do I need to expand it to being first touch attribution and conversion attribution? Where the first touch is the model you suggested, and the conversion attribution is my current model?

[Pierce_Ujjainw3]

Hey Matt,

I think it would be beneficial for you to expand your lead source tracking strategy and make it more flexible by using url parameters to track the 'where' as opposed to hard coding it into a specific page. Lots of visitors will not convert on that first page, but the source of that visit should still get credit for the eventual conversion.

I love dedicated landing pages for PPC, however over time I have realized that I was still missing out on lots of people who came to my PPC page and then converted on another page on my site during that same visit.

You can also create an original lead source field and a data management program that goes along with it that will take the value that comes in from the lead source field, write it to the original lead source field, and then have that field block all future updates. This way you know the original source of the lead, and then your lead source field will capture the most recent lead source.

It can be a little tricky at first, but once you nail this you get a lot of insight into what is actually driving your leads.

Hope that helps.

[Anonymous]

Hey Matt! Great question. There are two main ways to track attribution for digital brand/awareness campaigns:

1. For campaigns that link to your website, such as press, Pierce is right -- you either need to track it with UTM parameters or you need snag the referring domain.
2. For brand ads, such as display, view-through attribution becomes a powerful component. Measuring The True Impact Of Display Advertising: View-Through Conversion Tracking does a good job explaining the ins and outs of this.

If you're looking for a tool to help, quite a lot of Marketo customers are using Bizible to measure brand attribution as it includes referring domains, UTM tracking, and view-through conversion.

[Guy_Goldstein6]

One little trick that I picked up when developing a methodology for how to attribute "first touch" to events which happen prior to the lead's being created with Oktopost is that you should have a smart list "acquisition exceptions" which is defined as something like If UTM campaign is not empty and then use that for any "on site" conversion events so that if they fill out a form on the site it WON'T let the form be the acquisition program.

After that, your "pre-conversion" acquisition programs need to listen for new leads withe the correct "UTM campaign" value. Once you do that you'll successfully be able to differentiate between the sorts of activities you're doing on to drive people to your site, and the "organic" results of your site.

It's a bit of work to implement, but the results just look sexy!