How are people assigning lead attribution for online ads driving registrants to other programs?

[Anonymous]

I'm interested in feedback from the community about how they assign lead source attribution where an online ad (or print ad, for that matter) drives new leads to another program. This is a philosophical rather than a technical question. Here's what I mean - typically "Lead Source" = Channel Name and "Lead Source Detail" = Name of Program. E.g.,

Lead Source = Webinar;

Lead Source Detail = Webinar: How to XYZ 2016.6.15

But what if it was a banner ad that drove the webinar registration? Should the Lead Source be "Online Ad"? Or should it be "Webinar"? What about the Source Detail field? And if the answer is the Lead Source should be "Online Ad", how do you take it into account when measuring the success of the Webinar channel? Come to think of it, the same question would apply if you used a 3rd party list rental to drive webinar registrants.

Thanks in advance for any input!

[Nicholas_Manojl]

I think you're effectively describing a first touch vs multi-touch model.

Rather than get philosophical, you could rely on the out of the box tools in Marketo analytics.

Effectively your lead source is meaningless in a multi-touch model. It is the source, the originator, the acquirer - it tells you that and nothing else.

Your multi-touch model measures each program the lead has met a "success". Traditionally in Marketo, you would assign an equal portion of credit to each program that a lead has success. In your example above, your multi touch model would assign 50% credit to the first touch and 50% credit to the subsequent touch, rendered at close/won.

Maybe you are thinking of a custom field you could set-up - Program Source. This is effectively a "last click" model - you would assign the program source as to the name of the program the lead last met a success. Not sure how you'd set this up in Marketo but it could be done, I'm sure.

[Anonymous]

Hi Nicholas -

That's a good point and I agree with you.. However, I'd still like to know how people handle the lead source attribution fields in the scenario I provided. (And I've had some clients who insist on focusing First Touch attribution, despite my advice to the contrary).

Denise

[Josh_Hill13]

A Marketing Attribution Model that Works for Marketing Automation - Marketo & Salesforce - Consultin...

may help. I have some posts on my blog too.

[Anonymous]

Thank you, Josh! Your blog post crystallizes exactly the concepts I've been wrestling with.

The end of the post says "In upcoming posts, we will discuss just how to do this using Marketo and SFDC with, and without, Revenue Cycle Explorer." Did you end up having time to write those subsequent posts?

Denise

[Anonymous]

These are awesome questions!

1) When there are multiple channels driving demand, I strongly encourage companies to seek out multi-touch attribution. The need is just so great for B2B companies especially, because there are often multiple decision makers and long sales cycles that need to be accounted for in the models. A dedicated solution will help you here and I'd of course encourage you to check out bizible.com.

2) This is more philosophical than the first response, but we and all of our customers think channels and content, but not together. We have two lead, opportunity, revenue, etc reports... one to optimize our channels (like display) and another to optimize our content (like the PDF that was downloaded). Think about what drove people to the action and then what they consumed on your site. Attribution is multi-dimensional this way. A single touchpoint has both a channel and content associated with it, but they are different pivots of the data. You could even take the dimensions a step further with campaigns, but I'll save that for another time.

Hope this helps!

[Anonymous]

Hi Adam,

Thank you! I agree about the importance of multi-touch attribution. However, I guess I was asking a practical as well as a philosophical question. Based on your reply - it sounds like if we use my example of the online ad driving a (new-to-the-database) registrant to a webinar - you would advocate something like this for the lead source fields:

Lead Source: Online Ad

Lead Source Detail: Ad-for-Webinar XYZ

Am I interpreting you correctly?

Best,

Denise