What Is Marketing Attribution? – Definition – TrackMaven
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Marketing Attribution

Can you attribute your company’s success to the efforts of your marketing team? If you’ve ever struggled to prove ROI, marketing attribution can help you demonstrate the value of your marketing activities.

What is marketing attribution?

Marketing attribution is the process of connecting marketing activities to business outcomes.

A marketing attribution model determines how your organization credits leads across multiple campaigns and buyer touch points. It typically takes multiple touches along the buyer journey for a consumer to request information and actively “shop” for your product or service.

Attribution models store credit for these touch points so that your team can understand which campaigns contribute to sales and revenue. The three most common models are:

  1. First-Touch Attribution:

    Credits the first campaign a lead engaged with before converting.

  2. Last-Touch Attribution:

    Credits the last campaign a lead engaged with before converting.

  3. Multi-Touch Attribution:

    Splits credit amongst all of the campaigns along the buyer journey, based on either a set of pre-defined rules, a statistical model, or both.

Why is marketing attribution important?

Budget goes to the departments that are able to attribute their work. With attribution tools, marketers can use analytics to prove their contributions to revenue and business growth.

Marketing attribution allows marketing teams to optimize spend based on campaign influence. By understanding which campaigns are driving the most impact across different stages of the funnel, marketing teams can invest in campaigns that have a higher conversion rate and reduce time to close.

Balancing brand awareness and ROI is a difficult task for any marketer, but attribution gives you the data you need to justify how you are spending your resources. Attribution doesn’t just help you prove the impact of your marketing — it helps you to be a better marketer.

In a Sentence

My team uses marketing attribution to prove how content marketing campaigns influenced sales this quarter.