How Marketing Attribution Can Generate Real Results

It’s not often that counting stats and assigning attribution is so interesting that someone decides to write a book about it. It’s even rarer that that book is turned into a successful movie. But that’s exactly what happened when Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, took another look at the statistics of players he was considering drafting. Instead of using traditional statistics to attribute a player’s contribution to a team’s success, such as stolen bases, runs batted in, and batting averages, Beane looked for overlooked data that could provide a better clue to a player’s potential.  The Athletics didn’t win the Superbowl but they did become the first team to win 20 consecutive games—and Beane was played by Brad Pitt in “Moneyball.”

Most accurate attributions of success have much less dramatic results than Brad Beane’s but they can produce real results for companies that use them.

In a presentation at ClickZ Live New York in early 2015, Nick Necsulescu explained how TD Bank used multichannel attribution to understand how leads become customers as they consume the bank’s content. The aim was to understand how each channel impacted the final conversion. The bank found that interaction with social media content raised completion rates by as much as 33 percent and that when someone is ready or committed, they move quickly through the application process.

“We look at how decisive the consumer is,” Necsulescu told the event. "When someone is using multiple channels, they are less committed. Those in a single channel, moving forward with more purpose, convert at higher rates. It was an eye-opening to see how much of an impact the digital channels have."

Marketing Attribution Gives A Partner The Credit It Deserves

Google has also described what happened when it applied marketing attribution techniques on behalf of a “leading health care firm.” The company, which had more than $45 billion in revenue in 2013, wanted to increase the number of its online insurance applications through better use of its digital marketing budget. The marketing team wanted to know whether customers reached the company after visiting a search engine or after seeing a display creative, and how they could adjust their content strategy to increase effectiveness.

The company dropped its last-click attribution model and measured the incremental return from each network and channel using a first-touch attribution model. One partner, the company discovered, was generating conversion rates eight times higher than other partners. Within three months of using a more comprehensive marketing attribution model, the company had both doubled its conversion rate and decreased its cost-per-action by 25 percent.

In 2002, both the Oakland Athletics and the New York Yankees made the World Series playoffs. Both had achieved a shared goal. Smart use of attribution data though, meant that while the Yankees paid their players $125 million for that result, the Athletics paid just $44 million in salaries.

Marketing attribution might not win the World Series—or an Oscar—but it can save a business a great deal of money and deliver results.

Click here and get your FREE copy of ASTELO's practical guide:
"101 Content Marketing - The New Face of Digital Marketing".