Make Driving Revenue Easy (and Fun) With Weighted Multi-Touch Attribution Models
Are you using multi-touch attribution yet? When it comes to attributing revenue credit and calculating ROI for your B2B organization, there is nothing better.
B2B organizations often find themselves spending too much time focusing on the top of the funnel. Marketing has evolved from a primitive lead generation era to a prominent full circle marketing era. A complete visual data-rich buyer’s journey is now capable to attain, which enables B2B marketers to optimize and report for not only lead generation, but for what happens from the MQL to the SAL and even all the way to the win. The major advantage here for marketers is that you can identify which campaigns are not just driving interest but ones that drive real business for your company. With all your campaigns linked up to revenue, you can now understand where to make adjustments, duplicate your positive results and drive more revenue.
Because B2B sales cycles are not as cut and dry as B2C (some last up to a year), enterprise organizations have adopted the latest weighted multi-touch attribution models, as they provide a clearer customer journey picture. The concise data from being able to see the lead during and after their initial contact gives a performance edge over single touch and even-spread weighted models. Let’s take a look at a few multi-touch attribution model variations in heavy use today in the B2B world.
1. U-Shaped Multi-Touch Attribution First Multi-Touch Revenue Driver
In the U-shaped attribution model, weight is distributed in an even fashion with first and last touches getting most of the revenue credit. The mid-funnel interactions are not completely left out. The stand U model attributes around 20% to the MOFU.
Example Scenario: After closing a deal, 80% of revenue credit goes to first and last touchpoints; the rest is spread throughout the middle parts of the funnel. For example, if someone first clicks onto your page through a Facebook ad, then over the course of a couple weeks they interact with you here and there before finally buying, it’s the Facebook Ad and the very last interaction they had that would net 80% of the credit. The remaining 20% gets spread throughout mid-funnel activities.
These weighted touch-points offer an extra layer of visibility, and can be adjusted and optimized.
U-Shape is a major upgrade from single touch attribution and serves as a valuable model for marketers who want to focus on lead gen and last interactions without completely ignoring mid-funnel interactions.
One drawback you will find in this model is it doesn’t handle second and third touch points well. This is why enterprise organizations with longer sales cycles choose a more complex attribution model. Because often times you will find people interacting a few times later, and it’s that “lead magnet PDF” for example that should draw the credit. That’s where the W-Shaped and other complex attribution models excel.
2. W-Shaped Multi-Touch Attribution Model
A major difference you will find with W-Shaped models is a strong focus on lead-nurturing. This is because 30% of the credit goes to each touch point or set of touch points: the first lead campaign touch, the lead conversion or tipping point campaign, and the campaign touches after opportunity creation, while the remaining 10% spreads throughout the rest. It attributes interactions throughout the entire buyer’s journey.
Benefits from using the W-shaped multi-touch attribution campaigns:
- Reveals impact of the oft-neglected nurture stage
- The ability to attribute content to a revenue number
- Notices the impact on revenue given from actions taken post-lead-creation
- Gives marketing team more credit where it’s actually due thanks to the three main touch points
- Does a better job at measuring impact on pipeline and revenue
- See which campaigns source the most MQLs, possess the most influence and which produce the best velocity metrics
High performance B2B marketers focus on revenue. Instead of gauging for clicks and data, by attributing everything in correlation to revenue brought in, you begin to see where it is exactly you should be focusing. Maybe your top of the funnel is in fact being under-utilized with a W-Shape model for example. By narrowing down data to what drives revenue, you discover metrics that matter. And this is why you have options to choose the best funnel model for your unique situations.
Depending on your company, your prospects may respond to a wide variation of campaigns before each deal is closed or you may see more commonalities in routes to a closed deal. This is what makes multi-touch attribution so powerful. It gives marketers the confidence needed to decide which actions will best result in increased revenue.
If sales and marketing are aligned by having the same information about campaign performance, driving revenue becomes fun.
3) Weighted multi-touch attribution models create a massive opportunity to leverage never before accessed data
The weighted campaign influence model is the pinnacle of high-performance B2B multi-touch attribution marketing. It lets you place weight on individual touches according to various campaign factors. Here’s an example:
Campaign weighting can be based on the titles of who interacts with the campaigns (e.g., a response from a CMO has a higher weight than a response from a marketing intern), different campaign types (e.g., webinars vs. events), or when the response to the campaign happened (first touch, last touch, etc.).
Whether you ultimately choose a basic first/last touch/tipping point model or a multi-touch weighted attribution model should actually weigh on the shoulders of the historical data you’ve gathered. Ideally you want to build one of each, set them side-by-side, and see which does best at generating opportunities, analyzing which campaigns best convert those opportunities into revenue.
In Conclusion
Without clear funnel visibility, B2B marketers can’t look into their campaigns to see exactly what’s driving pipeline and revenue. Without clear visibility from MQL to the Close, B2B marketers are not able to see true lead quality nor make the best decisions for their organization.
At the end of the day it’s about old school marketing philosophies; the understanding of who your target market is, your perfect customer, your segmentation, how you target your messages and craft engaging content. As B2B marketers in 2016, the ideal way to do these fundamentals is with multi-touch attribution. So if you’re testing suggests it also, you’d be wise to hop on sooner rather than later.
When you have long complex sales cycles, non-weighted attribution models may limit your revenue potential and performance as a B2B marketer. Your value-add to the company’s revenue stream may be much more impactful with weighted multi-touch attribution strategies in place instead.
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