Factors Blog

According to Hubspot, marketers spend nearly 210 minutes a week analyzing data from different sources. What’s interesting, though, is that marketing professionals often struggle to determine the channels that facilitate customer journeys to fuel pipeline and revenue.

Coincidence? No.  

With a gamut of channels, touchpoints, platforms, and campaigns running simultaneously, it becomes difficult to determine which marketing strategy brings value to the table. 

Especially in the case of B2B marketing, multiple online & offline channels are involved. For instance, online channels involve social media, content, email marketing, etc., whereas offline channels include ebooks, webinars, workshops, meetings, etc.  

Thankfully, marketing attribution reporting can effectively solve this problem and assist businesses in shifting from intuition-driven strategies to customer-centric and data-driven strategies. 

Attribution reporting allows marketers to do an in-depth analysis at a granular level and give a clear picture of the direct impact of marketing strategies and tactics. 

Read our blog to understand exactly what attribution reporting is and what you can learn from marketing attribution reports to put your revenue growth on the fast lane . 

Let’s get started! 

Table Of Contents

• What Is Attribution Reporting? 
• Why Use Attribution Reporting And When To Use It? 
• What You Can Learn From Marketing Attribution Reports?
• How Can Organizations Leverage Attribution Reports To Skyrocket Their Conversions?
• Bonus Information: What Is The Attribution Window 
• Wrapping Up
• FAQs

What Is Attribution Reporting? 

Attribution reporting gives you a bird's eye view of the path your customer took before converting. Moreover, it also gives an in-depth insight into how different marketing efforts have cohesively worked to fuel conversions. 

Attribution reporting will help you to determine the following. 

• From which channels are the customers first becoming aware of your brand?
• Which campaign is driving the maximum demo form submissions or signups?
• Which piece of content/ad are they interacting with between opportunity creation and closed-won?
• Provide an actionable view of the buyer’s journey across multiple stakeholders who interact with multiple touchpoints over many months. 
• A transparent overview of the channels to generate leads, nurture them and finally convert.
  

You can leverage many attribution models to create a comprehensive report, such as first interaction, last interaction, linear attribution, etc. Attribution reporting gives crystal clear insights into the specific parts of your strategy and helps you highlight the areas that need improvement. 

All in all, marketing attribution reports summarize your customer journey data by building a timeline of touchpoints at a user and account level, combine that with vital channel metrics such as impressions, clicks, and spending and visualize the insights into a cohesive and effective report

Why Use Attribution Reporting, And When To Use It? 

One of the most rewarding aspects for a marketer is to see the successful result of their efforts. Once you start noticing the number of conversions from a strategy you have implemented or a piece of content you have posted, you know you have done your job right. 

But getting conversions is just one part of the job! The most gratifying part is to be able to measure and correlate the amount spent with the business ROI. 

This is where attribution reporting comes into play. 

An attribution report is nothing but a presentable outcome of your customer journey and campaign data. Therefore, an attribution report is only as valuable as the underlying data itself. Within your Marketing Strategy, attribution fulfills the need to optimize your marketing spending, allocate resources better, scale the right initiatives, and track channel performance.

That being said, you wouldn’t want to rely on a false source of optimization or, worse, vanity metrics to determine your marketing strategy. Attribution reporting provides you a credible foundation to build a data driven marketing execution engine.

Unlike a marketing team’s requirements for tracking KPIs, which tend to be an everyday ordeal, the frequency of usage of attribution reports is determined by the following factors

• How frequently are the campaigns optimized?
• What is the conversion cycle length from first touch to revenue
• What is the cadence of executive reporting for the CMO
• How frequently are budget re-allocation decisions made at your company
  

What You Can Learn From Marketing Attribution Reports?

Here are the learnings you can expect from marketing attribution reports. 

1. Better Comparison With  Model-Based Information

Companies increasingly use a multi-channel approach to educate and inform their target audience based on their preferences.  However, when too many channels are in action, it becomes challenging to determine which channel contributed the most to pipeline and revenue. 

Attribution reporting allows marketers to determine the contribution of each channel based on the chosen model and compare the results of different types of attribution models to make your investment decisions. For example, an Influence attribution model shows the amount of pipeline and revenue influenced by each campaign or content, whereas a First Touch Attribution report only credits the campaign or content for the revenue where it was the very first touchpoint.

Further, the conversion goals in attribution can be set as Top of the Funnel KPIs such as Leads, Demos or Mid Funnel Metrics such as MQLs, SQLs or Bottom of the Funnel metrics such as Pipeline and Revenue, helping Marketers understand the influence of each channel at various stages of the funnel. 

If you are a Saas company with both a PLG flow (SignUp and then Product Milestones) as well as a sales-led flow (Demo and then Opportunity Creation), you can use attribution analysis to understand which channels are most effective for each of these go to market models.

2.  Get An Overview Of Baseline Metrics

Baseline Metrics within Attribution provide a channel-level overview of investment metrics such as Impressions, Clicks, and Spending, along with platform-specific metrics such as Keyword Match Type, Search Impression Share for Google Ads. 

Attribution reporting tools aggregate these investment metrics across channels, enabling a Marketer to understand how much are they spending by a campaign, Ad group, creative, and keyword. Using these insights, Marketers can get a complete view of the performance metrics for each Campaign.

3. Analyze Conversion Metrics

A good attribution report combines the baseline investment metrics along with conversion metrics across the funnel such as leads, demos, SQLS, pipeline, and revenue. This helps Marketing teams move beyond measuring marketing efforts on metrics such as leads and get an accurate understanding of the impact on pipeline and revenue.  

Based on this information, you can assess the following:

• How many leads does each channel or campaign generate?
• How many of these leads are then converted to demos and sales-qualified leads by the campaign?
• How much pipeline and revenue were influenced by each of these channels or campaigns?

4. To Get Clarity On ROAS 

ROAS (return on ad spend) is a crucial metric that is used to measure the total revenue generated on every dollar spent on marketing. By bringing together the investment and conversion metrics, Attribution Reports highlights the profit margin and ROAS at a campaign, ad group, creative, or keyword level.

Companies may define different ROAS thresholds based on the type of campaigns - such as Product Feature Promotion, Competitive Takeout, and Brand Building. Also, depending on whether the campaign is more experimental (entry into a new product category or new geographic territory) or a well-established one, the ROAS thresholds may be different. Granular ROAS data allows marketers to make data-informed bidding decisions resulting in cost savings and improvement in return metrics.

5. Non-Paid Channels vs Paid Channels

It has always been a struggle for Marketers to determine whether paid or non-paid channels help accelerate your sales. However, attribution reporting gives you an extensive overview of different channels (such as Paid Search, Social, Referrals, Review Sites, and Organic Content) and their contribution to pipeline and revenue.

For instance, Let’s assume your business is active on LinkedIn and drives traffic from the platform through posts and ad campaigns. But when a lead is converted through LinkedIn, you will need to know which tactic contributed to the result - Was it the organic posts or ad campaigns? 

With attribution reporting, you can determine whether the lead got converted organically from the posts you shared or the ads campaign you are running or whether both tactics played a part in the conversion. 

A distinction between direct and non-direct sources of traffic helps identify your PPC leads and your organic ones. This, in turn, helps both the paid marketing teams and the content marketing teams optimize their execution strategies.

6. Attributing Sales Funnel

Attribution reports also enable Marketers to go beyond a single conversion goal and visualize the entire marketing and sales funnel (Leads, Demos, SQLs, Pipeline, and Revenue) at a channel, campaign, or ad group level. 

Armed with this data, Marketers can get a sense of the conversion rates by channel for each stage and focus their efforts accordingly.

7. Get A Clear Picture With Data Visualization

Lastly, because the Attribution Reports and underlying data are exhaustive and cover the entire customer journey and channel mix, it may feel a bit daunting to analyze this data solely in tabular form. 

The report can include dimensions such as keywords (and associated metadata such as keyword match type), ad groups, campaigns, campaign themes, and channels, as well as metrics such as spend, impressions, clicks, CTR, and conversion metrics as well. 

Phew.. - quite a handful to analyze this table of 15+ columns and 100+ rows to unearth actionable insights. This is where intuitive visualizations play a role in facilitating a better understanding of the data through formats such as scatter plots, bar charts, and line vs bar visualizations.

Further, an AI-powered attribution tool like factors.ai  is capable of offering augmented features in a report, such as recommendations on campaign bidding, trends in cost per MQL and SQL, and much more) 

How Can Organizations Leverage Attribution Reports To Skyrocket Their Conversions?

Now that you know what you can learn from attribution reports, we will take you to the next step. After doing an in-depth attribution analysis, now is the time to take some steps to accelerate the momentum of the conversions. 

Following are some ways organizations can leverage attribution reports:  

1. To Create A Result-Driven Content Strategy 

A crucial part of online marketing is creating a content strategy to ensure that the content created will be focused on the customer journey stage they are in. 

With attribution data, marketers can get an overview of the entire customer journey and leverage it to build a result-driven content strategy. 

2. Where Should You Expend Your Marketing Efforts? 

We all know attribution reporting gives deep insights into which channels drive conversions and users. Therefore, we can focus on those specific channels and generate maximum leads.  

3. To Fully Understand The Customer’s Journey 

You may know which channel drove the conversions, but you should also know about the touchpoints your customer interacted with before converting. 

Attribution reporting has the capability to do so, and therefore, it allows you to fully understand the customer’s journey right from the start till the end. 

Understanding this will allow you to create more effective strategies and journey paths that are aligned with buyer preferences.

Bonus Information: What Is The Attribution Window? 

An attribution window, also known as a conversion window, is the timeframe within which conversion will be attributed to a touchpoint. In layperson’s words, it can be defined as a time frame between which a potential lead viewed/clicked on your ad/piece of content and later performed your desired conversion action

 For example, suppose your attribution window is 20 days. In that case, any touchpoints (like users interacting with your landing page) incurred by prospects will only be linked to a conversion (actions like a demo request) if it occurred within 20 days of the touchpoint. Attribution windows also help distinguish your fresh leads from your re-engaged ones and hence remove the impact of interactions that happened a while ago.

The total number of conversions can be skewed if you don’t set the right attribution window. If you look it up, they’re different recommendations on setting an attribution window. Some recommend as little as 7 days, while others suggest 90 or 180 days. 

Setting the attribution window is largely dependent on the expected conversion cycle from first visit to revenue as well as the internal understanding among Go to Market teams (Sales and Marketing) on what would be the appropriate conversion window. Our recommendation would be to compute your average conversion cycle based on historical data and set double that value, post aligning with the sales team.

Wrapping Up

Without a doubt, we can say that attribution reporting is the most effective way to understand and measure the impact of Marketing Efforts on business outcomes. Insights generated from marketing attribution can become your most valuable asset to drive maximum ROI. 

When picking a solution to power your Attribution reporting, you want the best of the best. So keep your eyes peeled for solutions that offer capabilities such as:

• Bring in touchpoints from across data sources - such as website events (digital marketing)and offline touchpoints (webinars, events, e-books, sales calls, and meetings)
  

• Attributing your entire marketing and sales funnel stages and rather than focusing on a single conversion point such as Leads.
• Present both baseline investment metrics and conversion metrics, with the computation of ROI at a channel, campaign, ad group, keyword, page URL, or Theme level.
• Has advanced features to distinguish between new business vs expansions or new leads vs reactivated ones.
  

Opting for a solution that has these capabilities and more can take your attribution reporting to the next level.

Get started with attribution reporting with Factors.ai 

Factors.ai is an AI-empowered attribution reporting tool that helps you to fuel your marketing efforts by effectively comparing and customizing attribution models to generate a clearer picture based on metrics. 

Factors.ai has the capability to create attribution reports at both company and user levels, can track both website and non-website events, and has a customized dashboard that collects and visualizes all crucial data in one place.

If you’re interested in taking your business to next level by analyzing your marketing efforts with robust multi-touch attribution modeling and deep data-driven insights to make an informed decision then, schedule a demo and start for FREE at factors.ai.

FAQs ‍

1. What does attribution mean in marketing?

In marketing, attribution refers to the process of identifying and assigning credit to the various marketing channels and touchpoints that contribute to a conversion [or any desired action]. 

By understanding the effectiveness of these different marketing channels, businesses can optimize their marketing budget and resources to maximize their ROI.

2. Why is attribution reporting important for marketers in 2023? 

Attribution reporting provides a holistic view of how different marketing channels work together to drive conversions and revenue. It enables marketers to see which channels drive the most conversions and revenue and which are driving the most users to their website or mobile app. 

With this information, marketers can make more informed decisions about where to allocate their marketing budget and resources.

B2B marketing strategies that maximize growth

B2B marketing may be in trouble. Research suggests that B2B organizations are inadvertently transforming marketing into a supporting tool for the sales function. In reality, however, marketing is at the very core of a business. With the right principles securely in place, B2B marketing may well transform into the growth engine of B2B organizations. 

It’s about time we rethink the principles of marketing 

Linkedin’s B2B institute recently conducted wonderful research using B2B effectiveness data in collaboration with Peter Field, Les Binet and the IPA. The primary motivator of this research was to identify the best marketing principles that correlated with growth. Keep in mind that in this case, growth does not mean improving CTR, impressions, engagements or other traditional digital marketing metrics. Instead, we’re referring to growth in terms of market share, revenue, profitability, and other bottom line business metrics.

What makes this research especially special is the fact that it's never been done before through the lens of B2B marketing. That is, of course, until now. The following series will delve into each of these principles one article at a time with hopes of providing an intuitive, straightforward explanation of cutting-edge B2B marketing research.

If you had to take away one thing from this series, it’s this:

Extensive research and anecdotal evidence point to one thing — The key to marketing-sourced growth is balance. While this may seem obvious, the truth is that modern B2B marketing is almost always unbalanced. They tend to involve solely short-term, volume-based endeavors that play to logic and reasoning as opposed to a balanced view of short AND long term strategies that consider volume AND price, logic AND emotion, awareness AND fame. 

With that out of the way, let’s finally move on to the first principle of B2B marketing strategies that maximize growth.

Brand Building Vs. Sales Activation

A. Have Your Cake & Eat It Too:  Brand Building and Sales Activation I

In their research, Binet and Field identify two types of marketing: 

1. Sales activation: Sales activation definitely provides short-term growth. But while sales activation captures existing demand, it does not create it. Results with sales activation often produce results that decay just as fast they appear – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just something to keep in mind for the long term.

2. Brand building: Brand building provides long-term growth. In a sense, this creates and captures demand together. Note that when executed well, brand building delivers short-term growth as well. So the big takeaway is that you don’t have to pick between one or the other. In a sense, brand building contributes to future demand to ensure a durable pipeline of future sales and profits.

Ideally, a combination of both types of marketing will yield the best results. If you had to pick one, however, the choice is easy. Brand building is the only strategy that delivers both short-term and long-term growth. 

B. The 60/40 Rule: Brand Building & Sales Activation II

In B2C marketing, organizations with the most short-term and long-term growth spend most of their budget towards branding (60%) as opposed to sales activation (40%). In most B2B orgs, this marketing investment is skewed in the opposite direction; with most spend being allocated towards activation (54%). 

What might explain this variation? Put simply, B2B sales is harder. It involves several touch points across several stakeholders over several months. It also necessitates far more exposition around the product, use-cases, functional benefits, and more. There’s no doubt that in B2B, sales activation, especially in early-stages, has an important (albeit expensive) role to play. But as the novelty and needs of a new business fades, marketing needs to mature towards a brand-focused distribution to ensure sustainable growth.

C. Flip The Funnel: From ToFu/BoFu To In/Out Market

The funnel is a well-known construct in B2B marketing. The conventional B2B funnel depicts a voluminous top-of-the-funnel that wittles down along each step of the funnel towards the bottom of the funnel. Interestingly, Binet and Field suggest flipping the funnel. Rather than ToFu and BoFu, they recommend thinking of the funnel as “in market” buyers and “out market” buyers. In this case, activation spend is mostly for limited market  buyers while branding spend is for the much larger, out market buyers. 

This approach tends to be more customer-centric because:

1. Customers don’t think of themselves as being in the “brand building” phase or “sales activation phase”. Instead, customers think of themselves as being “in-market” to buy a product or “out-market” to not buy a product at this moment. 
2. Marketers have two customers: Your external customers and your internal finance team. Thinking about the funnel as current cash flow customers and future cash flow customers will help align marketing with the CFO or finance team as well. 

D. Different Stroke For Different Folks: 

Of course, in-market buyers are inherently very different from out-market buyers. This necessitates different approaches for creative, distribution, and measurement.

For in-market approach:

• Rational Messaging - for immediate ROI and value
• Narrower targeting - for a narrower market
• Sales metrics - revenue and pipeline are the most relevant KPI for in-market

For out-market approach: 

• Emotional Messaging - for long term brand retention
• Broder targeting - for a larger market
• Memory metrics - brand sense is an example of a relevant memory metric 

And there you have it. The first principles delved deep into the pros and cons of Sales Activation and Brand Building. While employing both approaches in unison are crucial to long-term success, the verdict is that, at the end of the day, the goal should be to prioritize brand building. We also highlight an unconventional perspective of the good old sales funnel. Join us next week to go over the second principle: Awareness vs Fame.

According to a study by Gartner, B2B buyers spent only 17% of their time meeting with potential suppliers and merely 5-6% of the entire time with the sales representative of each vendor. This means that the sellers have little opportunity to influence the buyer's decisions.

Buying decisions in B2B typically involve six or more individuals. And they prefer to do their own research instead of relying on the vendor's sales team. Their research includes industry publications, blogs, case studies, pricing, and customer reviews put out by the vendors. They often engage back and forth, moving from your website to your competitors. They take their time, compare, and decide on the best choice.

Hence, the interaction with the sales rep usually happens late in the buyer's journey. Marketing hence plays a much larger role in influencing the buying group's decision.

The back-and-forth engagement also results in multiple touchpoints across many channels. And by using marketing attribution models, a marketer can determine which touchpoints contribute to the conversion.

Many B2B marketing attribution software has emerged in recent years. But the big question is, how can these help? Why is it important for marketers? And which models should your marketing team be using?

Let's dive into the world of marketing attribution and find out!

Outline:

• What is marketing attribution? 
• What is the difference between marketing attribution, revenue attribution, and digital marketing attribution?
• Why is marketing attribution important/ useful?
• What are marketing attribution models?
• Common challenges of marketing attribution
• Why should CMOs consider marketing attribution
• How to pick the right marketing attribution tool?

What is Marketing Attribution?

Marketing attribution determines what marketing actions help a business reach its goals, like getting leads or growing revenue.

Suppose you're a marketing manager for a software firm. Your goal is to get more leads and earn more revenue.

To do this, you use various marketing channels such as Google search, organic search, LinkedIn ads, and so on. Meanwhile, the sales team contacts potential customers through emails and calls.

However, it can be challenging to know which channels work best and which need improvement. This is where marketing attribution comes in.

Attribution software acts like a GPS for your marketing efforts, helping you track the performance of every channel and campaign.

For instance, say your LinkedIn ads get the most leads, but your webinars don't perform as well. You can see this with the help of attribution software and change your strategy. Instead of putting more investment into an ineffective channel, you can focus on the channels that bring in leads and revenue.

The main goal of attribution is not to prove the marketing team's value but to help the team improve their efforts and get better results.

What's the difference between marketing attribution, revenue attribution, and digital marketing attribution?

‍When it comes to attribution, chances are you've come across a whole range of terms—namely, the following three.

1. Marketing attribution
2. Revenue attribution
3. Digital attribution
   

Well, be relieved to know that all these terms virtually mean the same things. They simply differ in terms of context. 

Marketing attribution refers to the process where you can quantify the influence of your channels on business metrics such as meetings, pipeline, and revenue. 

Revenue attribution is identical in essence but has a slightly different perspective. Here, the focus is more on assigning value to channels to estimate their revenue impact. 

And finally, digital marketing attribution is centered around attributing digital touchpoints. It exclusively focuses on the digital customer journey. 

Why is marketing attribution important (and useful)?

Have you ever heard the saying, "you can't manage what you can't measure"? Well, that's exactly what marketing attribution is all about.

Imagine a company, ABC, that sells enterprise software solutions to other businesses. The company has a sales team, a digital marketing team, and a trade show presence to generate leads and close deals. The sales team receives leads from a variety of sources, including:

1. The company's website through a contact form
2. A trade show where the company had a booth
3. An email campaign sent to target prospects
4. A referral from a satisfied customer

In this scenario, it's important for ABC to understand which campaigns are driving the most conversions. This way, they can allocate their budget and resources more effectively.

For example, let's say the company's sales team closed a deal with a lead that came from the trade show. It's difficult to determine whether the trade show was solely responsible for the conversion or if other marketing efforts also played a role. This is where B2B marketing attribution comes into play.

With marketing attribution, ABC can identify the marketing touchpoints that drove most conversions. This further allows the company to see which marketing channels are the most effective in driving sales. 

The tool helps the company to measure and attribute the success of your campaign and optimize and improve your strategies.

What are the functional benefits of marketing attribution?

1. Marketing ROI Optimization

With marketing attribution, B2B teams achieve a better and broader picture of each channel's cost-to-revenue ratio or ROI.

By understanding every channel's influence on lead conversion, pipeline, and revenue in relation to their cost, you can effectively quantify marketing performance. Ultimately, this leads to our next point — prudent marketing investment and spending.‍

2. Improved Marketing Spends

Using marketing attribution can make a significant impact on your marketing investment. This is because it provides crucial information about the performance of different marketing channels and tactics. Armed with this information, you can optimize your spending to achieve the end business objectives. Instead of distributing your investments evenly, you can double down on the channels that are actually performing better.

Consider this example. Imagine you have $10,000 to spend on a marketing campaign. Without attribution, you might split the money evenly between different channels. But with attribution, you might find that Linkedin conversational ads work best and are responsible for 80% of your conversions. So, in this case, you could put 80% of your budget towards Linkedin conversational ads and the rest towards other channels.

In short, marketing attribution helps you make decisions based on data instead of guessing. By knowing what's working, you can spend your money in the best way possible and get the biggest return on your investment.

3. Attribution and Content Marketing

Content marketing remains the best way to communicate effectively with customers and educate them about your offerings. And with the help of marketing attribution, you can take content marketing to the next level.

How?

Your content should engage with the target audience and drive demand for your products/services at every stage of the buying journey. For that, you need to create content that's tailored to your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Marketing attribution plays a crucial role in this process. It provides insight into which content resonates with your audience and leads to more conversions. Traditional CRM and MAP systems credit conversions to content only by a First Touch model (if the content was the first interaction the prospect had), which can be very misleading. 

You can also track how different pieces of content contribute to your pipeline and revenue. This allows you to optimize your content strategy.

For example, you may find that a particular blog post is driving a lot of traffic to your website but is not resulting in any conversions. In this case, you can analyze why this is happening and make changes to the content to increase its effectiveness.

Keep reading to learn more about the ROI of B2B content.

4. Mapping Out The Customer Journey

The use of attribution isn't limited to understanding channel influence on conversion. It's also a powerful tool to make sense of marketing's impact across each step of the funnel.

You can use it to identify the relationship between channel interactions, which touchpoints work together, and their relative probability of occurrence down the funnel. All of which help you map out your buyer's typical journey.

Marketing attribution models

Attribution models allow you to understand the different touchpoints in the customer journey and how each of them influenced your prospect to convert. The main goal of attribution models is to help marketers determine their campaigns' performance

For example, consider the following. 

A customer reached your website through a LinkedIn ad. Then, the customer further engages with your website content, like blogs and case studies, before becoming a lead. And finally, they are converted (booked a demo) after clicking on a retargeting ad.  

Now, depending on your business goals, the attribution model you choose assigns credit to different touchpoints. 

If your objective were to create awareness of your brand or product, the credit would be assigned to the first touchpoint. In this case, the LinkedIn ad. But if you were looking at conversion alone, the credit will be given to the last touchpoint, which is the retargeting ads. 

There are other scenarios too, where you assign credit to multiple touchpoints. But as we said, it depends on your business objective.

With that said, there are mainly two types of attribution models.

1. Single touch models
2. Multi-touch model

Types of attribution models

Single-touch 

As the name indicates, allocate the credit to a single touchpoint. Some types of single-touch attribution models are;

1. First touch 
2. Last touch
3. Last non-direct touch 

These types of attribution models are used mainly by businesses with a clear and straightforward marketing funnel and want to track the impact of specific touchpoints on conversion

Multi-touch

Again, as the name implies, multi-touch models allocate credit to multiple touchpoints in the customer journey. The main focus of this model is to give a more accurate picture of your marketing channels' impact on conversion.

Some of the types of multi-touch attribution models are:

1. Linear attribution model
2. Time-decay attribution model
3. U-shaped attribution model
4. W-shaped attribution model

Here, take a look at our take on the seven types of attribution models with examples that can help you understand the attribution models better. 

So, how to choose the suitable model for your business?

Choosing the right model for your business can be a challenge. As the saying goes, ‘all models are wrong, but some models are useful. But it's essential to select the one that helps you answer the specific questions you have in mind.

With that said, let's look into the factors that affect choosing the model and how to select the right one for your business.

Some factors that affect the choice of attribution model are as follows.

• The nature of the buyer journey cycle - This includes the length of the sales cycle and the number of decision-makers.
• The nature of the product. Does the product belong to an established category or a new one?
  

Here are seven steps to help you choose the right attribution model: 

1. The first and foremost thing to do is to understand your business goal. Ask yourself, "What do I want to achieve with attribution modeling?". The answer can help you select a model that aligns with your business goals.
2. Speak with your customer to understand their customer journey and the touchpoints involved. Anecdotal assessments of how each touchpoint contributed to conversion can help you select an appropriate model.
3. Evaluate different attribution models. Compare the strengths and weaknesses of each model and see how they align with your business goals.
4. Do A/B testing. Test each model and compare the results. This will give you a better understanding of the model that will work best for you.
5. Some attribution models require more data than others. So, consider the data you have and select the model that aligns with the data you have.
6. Constantly review and adjust the models. It's crucial to ensure that your model is relevant and accurate. So, as your business grows and evolves, you should review the current one and make the necessary changes.
7. Evangelize the results of the selected attribution model and get buy-in from relevant teams - field marketing, digital marketing, and sales so that all equally accept the results from the model you select.
   

Common challenges with marketing attribution

Whilst the benefits of attribution analysis are clear and unquestionable, there are certain challenges and limitations which need to be highlighted. We will briefly discuss a few B2B attribution challenges here. You can follow up on the link to learn more about the B2B attribution challenges and how to overcome them. 

Complex customer journey: 

B2B customers often go through a lengthy and intricate buying process. There is usually a group of 4-6 people researching and deciding between vendors before moving to purchase. Not to mention the multiple touchpoints across many channels that influence decision-making.

Marketers can't determine which touchpoints are affecting the sales pipeline and revenue without proper attribution. This makes it hard to track the success of their campaigns and make improvements.

However, attribution makes it easier to see all the touchpoints, even if the customer journey is complex. Also, when choosing an attribution software, ensure that it includes the deanonymization feature. This can help track the entire journey of all the buying committee members, even if they browse anonymously. 

Longer sales cycle:

B2B purchases require a significant investment. Hence the decision-making process is more rigorous and complex than B2C sales. On top of that, there are contractual agreements, regulations, and budget approvals that further add up the time. 

According to Klipfolio, around 75% of B2B companies take an average of 4 months to onboard a new customer. And depending on your sales process, the time can be longer or shorter. 

Because the B2B sales cycle is complex and lengthy, it can be difficult to find out which touchpoints influenced the prospect to convert. Moreover, it can take months or years to see the results of your marketing activities. Thus, making it harder to attribute the conversion to a specific campaign. 

By using multi-touch attribution models, marketers can understand the impact of their campaigns. This would help them prioritize marketing investments and create a more engaging customer experience. 

Multiple touchpoints:

Customers often interact with your company through multiple channels before purchasing. These can be both online and offline interactions. Also, a customer can engage with your company at different stages of the buying journey. 

 For example, a customer may receive an email about a product. They then visit the company's website for more information, only to later attend a trade show and have a follow-up conversation with a sales representative. Each touchpoint could have a different impact on their decision-making process.

But, determining which touchpoints had the most significant impact can be difficult. One solution is to use an attribution tool that can track all these diverse channels and bring all the interactions together in one place.

Tracking and defining offline touchpoints:

In a B2B sales process, the customer engages with the vendors through both online and offline touchpoints. This makes it difficult to track and attribute conversions accurately, as you now need to stitch data across systems.. 

For example: consider a set of B2B customers. They attended a trade show and got on a call with your sales team. Afterward, they sign up on your website and complete the purchase. Here, it will be hard to determine credit for a touchpoint if you don't have the right attribution solution. 

Marketing analytics software, like Factors, enables tracking of both online and offline touchpoints. Factors has a click-and-select UI through which the offline touchpoints can be set up from your CRM / MAP platform. This ensures that you have a detailed view of the customer journey.

Sales-Marketing alignment:

Alignment between Marketing and Sales teams is essential to maximize returns. However, this is easier said than done. In many B2B companies, there's a lack of communication between the two teams, making it hard to reach potential customers. Fighting for credit can be a reason for this disconnect, as each team believes their efforts to be the reason for closing a deal.

 Bridging this alignment divide can be achieved in two ways.

1. Emphasize that both teams are not independent but part of a larger go-to-market function. 
2. Unify the customer journey data across marketing and sales touchpoints.
   

Sophisticated Marketing Attribution solutions such as Factors can help here by providing a clear and consistent view of the customer journey. On top of the unified data foundation, teams can get answers to questions such as 

• How many touchpoints did it take to convert a deal? How many of these were sales vs. marketing touchpoints?
• Were marketing efforts able to drive engagement with the right stakeholders in these accounts?
• When is the right time for sales teams to intervene so as to convert an account?
  

Furthermore, each team can review and analyze the attribution data to understand which of their strategies are working and which are not. From a sales perspective, such analysis can help in defining the frequency and content of email sequences, calls, and meetings that lead to maximum impact. 

Why should CMOs consider marketing attribution?

As a CMO, you are often asked to achieve better results with limited resources. Meanwhile, the buyer's journey has become complex, with more channels, stakeholders, and a longer buying cycle. Attribution Software can be a valuable guide, helping you in the following ways.

Better decision-making

By understanding the customer journey, you can determine the channels to focus on and how to allocate your limited budget. 

Improved ROI

Attribution lets you know which channels effectively drive conversions. Therefore, it allows you to allocate expenditures accordingly and generate better results.

Increased accountability

You can unambiguously measure and track your marketing effort's impact. Good or bad, you can hold yourself and your team accountable for the results while continuously finding ways to improve.

Enhanced customer understanding

You can gain a deep understanding of customer behavior and interactions with marketing and sales initiatives. You can know what types of content your customers are seeking, the landing pages they interact with, and more. This enables you to optimize future campaigns to align with the customer's interests.

You can read more about the importance of marketing attribution for CMOs here. 

How to choose the right marketing attribution tool?

‍Choosing a marketing attribution tool requires careful consideration of several factors. Some of the key considerations are

1. Data Integration: Ensure the tool integrates easily with your existing data sources. This includes your CRM, marketing automation platform, web analytics, CDPsand advertising platforms.
2. User-friendly interface: Make sure the tool is easy to set up, track campaigns, and analyze results. 
3. Model flexibility: Choose the tool that offers a range of attribution models. This way, you can choose the most appropriate one aligning with your business goals. 
4. Reporting and analysis: Check whether the tool provides robust reporting and analysis capabilities. This is important for you to understand the impact of your campaigns on lead generation and conversion.
5.  Customer support: Check the quality of the customer support offered by the vendor. It's best to choose the one who provides good technical support and training.
6. Security: Ensure the tool has robust security measures to protect your data. 
7. Cost: Consider the cost of the tool in relation to the value it can deliver to your business.
   

Ultimately, the right attribution tool for your business will depend on your specific needs and goals. Consider your budget, the data you want to track, and the level of analysis you need.

Factors is one of the leading marketing analytics and attribution tools purpose-built for the B2B segment. It can help businesses make data-driven decisions by accurately attributing conversions to the most influential touchpoints. Some of the highlights of Factors include

1. Enables attribution of offline touchpoints such as webinars, field events, and so on.
2. You can visualize the customer journey at an Account and User Level. 
3. Easily integrates with tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, 6sense, Segment, and Rudderstack
4. Supports Account Level Analytics and Attribution natively
5. You can compare attribution models and select the one most aligned with your business objectives
6. Provides an extensive set of filters and breakdowns to create rapid, relevant ad hoc reports in seconds.
7. AI-fueled insights into performance, anomalies, and fluctuations. 
   

If you’re looking for a marketing analytics tool that facilitates all your attribution needs, look no further than Factors.ai. Sign up for free to learn more about Factors, or book a personalized demo today!

Dreamforce 2022: The Ultimate List of Dreamforce Mixers, Parties & More

It’s happening. It’s finally happening. After a two-year hiatus, Salesforce is back with its biggest ever event — Dreamforce 2022. Join a diverse group of speakers (including Jane Goodall and Magic Johnson!) in San Francisco to learn, grow, and make new friends. Still looking for reasons to go? Red Hot Chili Peppers will be performing at Dreamforce with all proceeds benefiting UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals. We can’t wait to see you there! 

Needless to say, Dreamforce 2022 has an extensive agenda with several complementary mixers and afterparties taking place alongside main events. Picking which events to go to will require planning. We’ve put together this comprehensive list of the hottest mixers and parties to help you with the same. Have fun and we hope to see you there! 

Monday, 19th Sep - Day 0️⃣ - Pre-Dreamforce Mixers, Parties, and Events

1. Marketers Welcome Bash - RSVP here

Join like (and unlike) minded professionals in a welcome party designed to bring marketers together for an evening of drinks, food, and great music. Spots are limited, so book yours ASAP!

When & Where: 4pm – 8pm, The Pink Elephant Alibi

2. Ice, Ice Breaker Happy Hour - RSVP here

Introhive and Uncommon Purpose kick us off with the first happy hour of the week. Enjoy a few drinks and build great connections across the salesforce ecosystem before DF2022 officially kicks off. 

When & Where: 5pm – 7pm, The Bottle Club Pub

3. Professional Services Reception - RSVP here

Introhive is hosting another wonderful event before DF2022. This one, however, is exclusive to professional services firms. A great evening of seafood, conversations, and libations! 

When & Where: 6pm onwards, Waterbar

4. E Komo Mai DF22 - RSVP here

E Komo Mai is the self-proclaimed unofficial official kick-off party at Dreamforce 2022. Enjoy a great night of food, drinks, and live Hawaiian music by Haopinaka.

When & Where: 5pm – 8pm, Black Hammer Brewing Company

5. Dreamforce 2022 Day 0: For All Dev-Kind - RSVP here

You’ll be in a stellar company of developer superstars across Salesforce, MuleSoft, Slack and Tableau. Share your vision as you continue to shape the future of development together!

When & Where: 7pm – 10pm, Temple SF

Tuesday 20th - Dreamforce Day 1️⃣ - Mixers, Parties, and Events

1. DF22 Newbie Reunion "Bacon" Breakfast - RSVP here

What’s your favorite meal of the day? Ours is breakfast. Join newbies and vets alike for a lovely meal before DF22 gets really, really busy. Note: tickets for this event will run you $45, with proceeds going to Project Night Night

When & Where: 7:00am – 9:00am, Tuesday 20th, Sears Fine Food 

2. Bloodys & Breakfast - RSVP here

Not early-bird enough to attend the Newbie Reunion? No worries, Dreamforce has got you covered with Bloodys & Breakfast — comes with a side of Leadgen strategy as well!

When & Where: 8am – 10am, Tuesday 20th, The Pink Elephant Alibi

3. Clari’s Run Revenue Reception - RSVP here

In addition to lovely food and craft cocktails, join Clari’s reception to hear from industry leaders, network with the very best, and enjoy a sneak peek into Clari’s roadmap

When & Where: 4:00pm – 7:00pm, Tuesday 20th, Terra Gallery

4. Slalom Fest - RSVP here

Don’t miss Slalom’s Dreamforce party. Treat yourself to an incredible evening in San Francisco’s beautiful Minna Gallery for delicious bites, craft cocktails, great company, one of San Francisco's best DJ's, local artists, and more.

When & Where: 6:00pm – 10:00pm, Tuesday 20th, Minna Gallery

5. Devs, Drinks & Dreamforce – RSVP here

Copado and CloudFulcrum are bringing out the balloons to celebrate 20 years of Dreamforce! Grab a drink with fellow Trailblazers at Hotel Zetta, preview Copado's Fall '22 Salesforce DevOps Platform and plan digital transformation projects with DevOps experts. 

When & Where: 5:30pm – 8:30pm, Tuesday 20th, Hotel Zetta

6. Cocktail Chillout - Meet & Mingle – RSVP here

Meet the folks from Proximity over a couple of delicious cocktails under some beautiful canapes at the American Bookbinders Museum.

When & Where: 5:30pm – 7:30pm, Tuesday 20th, American Bookbinders Museum

7. Opera After Party – RSVP here

Join Opera at the historic Mark Hopkins hotel to unwind after Day 1 of DF22

When & Where: 6pm-7:30pm, Tuesday 20th, Mark Hopkins

8. Wine and Cheese Soirée - RSVP here

Join Revenue Grid for an exclusive evening of exquisite wine, delicious cheese, and great conversation at Wine and Cheese Soirée. Enjoy a unique culinary experience while networking with industry peers and opinion leaders in a great ambiance.

When & Where: 6:00pm, Tuesday 20th, Social 303 Restaurant

9. Modern Sales Pros - RSVP here

Modern Sales Pros is back with their wonderful Happy Hour. Sales managers, leaders, ops, and enablement pros from all over the world are welcome to join. The best part? You don't need to be attending Dreamforce to come. 

When & Where: 6:00pm – 9:00pm, Tuesday 20th, Delarosa

10. Third Republic & Salesforce Ben’s Dreamforce Paradise - RSVP here

End day 1 at DF22 with a bang at Dreamforce Paradise. We’re talking open bars, all-night DJs, Tarot readers?? And silent auctions to support charities. It’s all happening here.

When & Where: 8:00pm – 12:00am, Tuesday 20th, Zombie Village

Wednesday 21th - Dreamforce Day 2️⃣ - Mixers, Parties, and Events

1. Coffee + Connect - RSVP here

Join the FormAssembly team for coffee! It’s a great opportunity to meet data collection experts, mingle with other FormAssembly users, and enjoy a complimentary breakfast.

When & Where: 7:30am – 10am, Wednesday 21th, Wine Down SF

2. Empanadas On The Embarcadero - RSVP here

What’s better than some delicious empanadas before a long afternoon of Dreamforce events? Join Lab5 as they host a Peruvian-theme pre-game mixer before Dreamfest kicks-off.

When & Where: 3:00pm, Wednesday 21th, La Mar – Pier 1½, The Embarcadero

3. Conversations and Cocktails at Dreamforce - RSVP here

Join Flosum and other DevOps, Data Management & Security community members and leaders for cocktails and conversations with a beautiful view of the city to celebrate Dreamforce!

When & Where: 5:00pm – 7:00pm, The View Lounge

4. Dreamfest Happy Hour - RSVP here

Join Odaseva, WithSecure & AppOmni at the famous San Francisco hot spot: Local Edition. Visit with new and old friends in the historic Hearst building which features the ambience of California's famous printing and newspaper legacy.

When & Where: 5:00pm – 7:00pm, Wednesday 21th, The View Lounge

5. Strengthen Ties Happy Hour - RSVP here

Join Dun & Bradstreet, Studio Science, Traction Complete, and Uncommon Purpose for a drink before Dreamfest.

When & Where:  5pm -- 7:30pm, Wednesday 21th, Bottle Club Pub

6. Californication Cocktail Party - RSVP here

Attend Zennify’s mixer for an evening of entertainment, cocktails, music, dinner, and dessert. Join in before Dreamfest OR stay during the concert. They promise to make sure you have an epic San Francisco night!

When & Where: 5:00pm – 8:00pm, Wednesday 21th, Thriller Social Club

7. Party with CodeScan - RSVP here

Join CodeScan for a happy hour at Bar Agricole to get back into the swing of things with some of the very best in Californian cuisine and craft cocktails.

When & Where: 7:00 p.m. PT until late, Wednesday 21th, Bar Agricole

8. The Engagement Party - RSVP here

For over 15 years, the Engagement Party has been the go to event at Dreamforce for the .org community. 

When & Where: 7:30pm – 11:00pm, Wednesday 21th, The Pawn Shop

Thursday 22nd - Dreamforce Day 3️⃣  - Mixers, Parties, and Events

1. Wine Down - RSVP here

Dreamforce is over. But not quite. Come and enjoy a glass of wine (or equivalent) and chat about the best bits of Dreamforce and network with your peers.

When & Where: 4:00pm – 7:00pm, Elements Spaces

2. 10th Annual michaelforce Cigar Shindig - RSVP here

“It's been asked: if you didn't attend the post-Dreamforce Cigar Shindig, did you even attend Dreamforce?” - michaelforce 2022

When & Where: 5:00pm – 8:00pm , Cigar Bar and Grill

3. Soberforce Happy Hour - RSVP here

Come enjoy a night of good music, tasty appetizers and delicious non-alcoholic refreshments. 

When & Where: 5:00pm – 7:00pm, Salesforce Tower

Looking for the hottest SaaStr mixers to hit up in and around the Bay Area? We’ve got you covered with this comprehensive list of SaaStr events, after-parties, and more. See you there!

SaaStr 2022 is officially afoot. Join the biggest community of SaaS founders, executives, and leading minds from 13-15th September to learn, network, and let loose. Unsure about which of the dozens of SaaStr mixers to check out? Find the best ones below:

SaaStr Day 1️⃣ - Sep 13th, 2022 - SaaS events, mixers, and after parties

1. Zendesk & Endeavor Happy Hour

Zendesk & Endeavor is a wonderful opportunity to interact with high level executives from some of the most promising, high-growth start-ups. Of course, this includes stars from Zendesk as well — including COO Jeff Titterton and Director of Strategic Investments, Terry Evans.

When: 5PM-8PM, September 13, 2022

Where: 

Pinstripes, Ballroom A

36 Hillsdale Mall

San Mateo, CA 94403

https://pinstripes.com/san-mateo/

Save a seat here

2. SAAS Comedy Show

Take a trip downtown to enjoy an evening of networking, negotiations tips, SaaS stacks and of course, good laughs. The event is hosted by Cloudeagel, Sprinto, and Chargebee for CFOs, CIOs, CEOs, CXOs and other finance and IT leaders from organizations with at least 100 employees.

When: 7:30PM-9PM, September 13th

Where: Kohl Pumphouse (101 9th Ave, San Mateo Downtown)

3. Lavender X Correlated - SaaStr Happy Hour

When: 5PM-7:30PM, September 13th

Where: Refuge San Mateo

4. SaaS Connect Cocktails

Take a quick break between SaaStr conferences and your late-evening after-parties by dropping into SaaS Connect Cocktails for an early drink or two. The cocktail party is set to host some cutting SaaS teams including AppBind, Impact, and PartnerStack. 

When: 5-8PM, September 13th

Where: The Clubhouse Bistro, Foster City

Save you seat here

5. Oh Snap! Sips & SaaS with Fullstory 

Who doesn’t love a good throw back? With old school beverages, bites, and business straight from the 90s, Fullstory is ticking all the right boxes with its Sips & SaaS mixer. The only thing that may seem futuristic is all the great tech created by the SaaS pros you’ll meet.

When: 6:30-8:30PM, September 13th 

Where: Fogbird, 144 South B Street, San Mateo, CA

Save your seat here

6. NightCap Happy Hour

Capchase and Ramp are bringing together a cohort of the most promising SaaS leaders. This is your chance to take a break from the hustle and bustle of SaaStr with some great food, and better company. Note that seats are limited so you should register ASAP!

When: 6:30PM, September 13th

Where: Central park Bistro, 181 E 4th Ave, San Mateo

Limited seats! Register now

7. Outreach at SaaStr: Curry Up Now Afterparty

What’s the one thing everyone needs after a long day of SaaString? That’s right — A big big spread of Indian street food. Join the wonderful Outreach team and get yourself involved in conversations, connections, and…curry. Doesn’t get much better than this.

When: 6PM-9PM, 13th September

Where: Curry Up Now, 129 S B St, San Mateo

Register here!

8. Opp-tober Fest - Tripactions and Cobalt

Okay. Not a fan of the pun. Definitely a fan of the beer. October is early in San Mateo as Tripaction and Cobalt encourage you to hang out with other *sigh* B2B Prost-fessionals for a night of  Oktoberfest-inspired meals and merries. 

When: 6PM-9:30PM, September 13th

Where: Wurst Hall, 310 Baldwin Ave, San Mateo

Sign up here

9. Happy Hour with Safebase

What could possibly be better than icy beers at Opp-tober fest? How about icy beers AND pizza at Safebase’s wonderful happy hour. What’s more? They’re hosting a golf simulator in collaboration with Dryvebox. What’s your handicap anyway? 

When: 6:30PM-9PM, September 13th

Where: Rise Woodfire, 2, North B Street, San Mateo

Save a spot here

10. Bowling with Stripe

Bowling! Bocceball! Snacks! The perfect after party for 12 year ol  – SaaS professionals. Stripe is hosting a super fun happy hour. Drop by and say hi to their founders.

When: 6PM-9PM, 13th Sep

Where:

Pinstripes San Mateo, Floor 2

36 Hillsdale Mall

San Mateo CA 94403

Register now

SaaStr Day 2️⃣ - Sep 14th, 2022 - SaaS events, mixers, and after parties

1. The B2B Comedy Roast

After visiting the wonderful Mutiny team at Booth 177, join them for an evening of laughs, great food, and refreshing drinks at the Hillsdale Mall. The B2B Comedy Roast is co-hosted by Chili Pepper so you’re certain to meet a few ingenious SaaS masterminds.

When: 6-9PM, September 14th

Where: Pinstripes, 26 Hillsdale Mall, San Mateo

RSVP here

2. After Party with Carta & Notion

When: 6:00pm - 9:00pm, September 13 

Where:  Foreigner, 60 E 3rd Ave Ste 108, San Mateo, CA

Sign up here

3. After Party with Mercury and CRV

When: 4:30PM-7:30PM, Sep 14th

Where: The Swingin’ Door, 106, E 25th Ave, San Mateo

Register here

4. After Party with Openphone & Scratchpad

When: 6:30PM-10PM, Sep 13th

Where: Food Crush, 251 S B St, San Mateo

RSVP here

5. Community Meetup by Threado

When: 7PM-9M, September 14th

Where: The Blacksmith, 2048 Broadway, Redwood City, CA

RSVP here

6. Taco-Bout Founders with MicroAcquire

UPDATE: As fun as this sounds, we hear that this event is 100% booked out already. Sorry! 

When: 6PM onwards, September 14th

Where: San Mateo

SaaStr Day 3️⃣ - Sep 15th, 2022 -  SaaS events, mixers, and after parties

1. Inclusion Lounge

Our personal favorite mixer this year is definitely Women in Revenue’s happy hour for all women, nonbinary, and gender fluid folk working in roles aligned with revenue. Sounds like a great opportunity to make new friends and connections. We’re really looking forward to it!

When: 4-6PM, September 15th

Where: Sponsor Hall near between Brex (#801) and Laika (#311)/Carta (#312)

This article on advanced marketing analytics covers…

• What is advanced marketing analytics?
• Limitations with marketing analytics
• Normalization of data prior to marketing analytics
• An overview of advanced marketing analytics techniques
• How to implement the advanced marketing analytics techniques?
• How Factors can help your business?
• Frequently Asked Questions

The impact of advanced marketing analytics has consistently expanded in B2B marketing. Making sense of relevant marketing data using analytics has always been of interest to marketers, but the ability to connect large data-set across various channels and programs has taken data-driven decision making to the next level. 

But how exactly can marketers go about making the most of their data? And once techniques and strategies for advanced marketing analytics have been identified, how can one ensure a smooth, frictionless implementation.

Most discussions of cutting-edge marketing and sales analytics tend to get bogged down in jargon. In this article, we will discuss the most effective methods of marketing analytics in simple terms. In order to provide a sense of how these methods operate in practice, we’ll also share a few concrete examples. Then, we'll highlight how advanced marketing analytics may be best used by data-driven marketers.

What is advanced marketing analytics?

Advanced marketing analytics is an all-encompassing term. It refers to a variety of advanced techniques and tools that teams employ to extract additional value from their data. By utilizing advanced marketing analytics, you’ll be able to predict patterns and generate accurate behavioral forecasts of your target audience and customers.

In short, advanced marketing analytics increases the value of campaigns for marketers, optimize ROI, and scale growth and pipeline.

Various types of analytics constitute advanced marketing analytics:

Regression Analytics: Regression Analytics examines the links between a dependent variable and an independent variable. This is an excellent technique for identifying trends in data, as the associations discovered in your sample will also exist in the larger population.

Predictive Analytics: Predictive analytics is a crucial component of advanced analytics, as it enables the discovery of solutions to unanswered questions. This sort of analysis employs numerous techniques from other data processes (such as data mining, AI, machine learning, and modeling) to do a comprehensive study of available data in order to make a future forecast. 

Prescriptive Analytics: Business analytics culminates in prescriptive analytics. This is the method of finding the greatest potential outcome by employing technology to examine raw data and make judgments based on existing descriptive and predictive analytics.

A few limitations with basic B2B marketing analytics

In some instances, analytics may misinterpret data, leading to ill-informed decisions. This section discusses the limitations that marketing analytics can present to an organization. A few limitations are listed below:

Misidentification of marketing needs: Basic marketing analytics methods can sometimes overestimate or underestimate the market’s needs and behaviors: what do customers want, how well are competitors performing, what messaging resonates most with the audience. This, in turn, may mislead your team into making suboptimal decisions around marketing strategy.

Evaluating marketing growth in the absence of a market share: Analyzing the market should provide an idea of your potential opportunities. However, this analysis may not always be comprehensive, leading to missed opportunities that may have otherwise seemed obvious. So, in order to be sure of your data, a comprehensive market share analysis is suggested to provide sufficient context.

Improper Data Interpretation: Collecting data from multiple sources aids in data analysis, but data interpretation is an entirely separate process. If anything, interpreting data requires significantly more effort — and failing to allocate adequate resources towards this step will likely result in inaccurate conclusions.

This is where advanced marketing analytics comes into play. By utilizing advanced methods, B2B teams can help themselves achieve improved operational efficiency, increased customer satisfaction, scalable revenue, and optimized ROI.

Normalizing data prior to analysis

Before engaging in advanced analytics, the wisest investment is to thoroughly prepare the foundations of your data. Ensure that fundamental reporting requirements are met through a robust automated data and reporting pipeline, which will liberate resources, eliminate human error, and enhance data quality.

The quantity & variety of data also have an important influence. The majority of advanced analytics approaches perform substantially better with bigger volumes of granular data acquired from several sources. Remember that the results of your deployments of advanced analytics will only be as good as the data you supply.

An overview of advanced marketing analytics techniques

#1 Customer Lifetime Value

It can be an expensive error to direct marketing efforts towards the incorrect audience. Using the aforementioned conversion prediction methods, marketers can generate a list of people that are likely to convert into customers, but how do you identify the most valuable leads out of this set?

Despite their initial satisfaction, a huge number of customers never come back to a business again. A possible churn awaits those who do so. Only a small percentage of customers will remain loyal over the long term, and even fewer will go on to become true brand advocates. This underrepresented group is the most important. Especially in B2B SaaS, the Pareto principle (80/20 rule) almost always holds true: 20% of consumers generate 80% of value.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) estimates a client's future earnings using a sample of their past purchases. With this information in hand, marketers may cut costs on clients who aren't lucrative, strengthen their focus on channels that bring in similar, paying consumers, and work to reawaken the interest of previously inactive customers.

How can Factors help with CLV?

Using Timelines, Factors can generate user and account level timelines of the entire customer journey from first touch to deal won. This is especially useful to B2B SaaS organizations wherein sales cycles involve several stakeholders from the same account. The ability to visualize every touch-point based on account, roles, etc offers granular insight into what’s working for whom and in which account.

#2 Marketing Attribution

How efficient are your methods for analyzing the efficacy of marketing campaigns? How much should you be investing in each advertisement? What channels should you cut to drive ROI? These are fundamental inquiries that any successful marketing strategy must address. Due to the increasingly complex, nonlinear nature of customer journeys, marketing attribution is increasingly gaining relevance.

There are a number of ways to implement a marketing attribution strategy, and some of them entail very basic business standards, like giving all of the credit for a conversion to the very first or very last click. There are other others, though, that demand more intricate mathematical and probabilistic methods. Multi-channel attribution makes sense for firms that operate in a digital environment and analyze engagement metrics like clicks, conversions, and click pathways. Marketing Mix Modeling is a supplementary method utilized by businesses that employ conventional marketing channels (MMM). It utilizes what-if scenarios and is based on regression analysis, a well-studied statistical method. What would happen, for instance, to income if spending on television were to rise by x percent? If you already know the answers to these questions, you can use them to better allocate resources for future initiatives.

Marketing Attribution on Factors

As previously mentioned, marketing attribution is the analytical science of determining which marketing tactics are contributing to sales or conversions. Attribution models give marketers insights into how marketing dollars are best spent by showing touch points that earn the most engagements. Factors delivers a robust marketing attribution suite with a wide range of multi-touch attribution models. Want to learn more? Find a good time here.

#3 Clustering

Clustering is a valuable tool for B2B marketers. The goal is help marketers divide their target audiences into manageable subsets. This allows for  better targeted content, campaigns, and offers. It is possible to generate several types or clusters of customers using heuristic rules: "Show content of type A if the customer is a millennial; show content of type B if they are gen Z."

With today’s abundence of and accessibility to large volumes of data, clustering has evolved into an effective technique to categorize a large number of clients based on any number of features or properties. These clusters emerge as a result of a statistical analysis of data using a measure of the mathematical distancing between various attributes. Customers with comparable ratings will be placed together.

Age, income, spend, duration of time since last purchase, etc. are all examples of features that can be used to segment customers. Similar success can be achieved when clustering keywords according to metrics such as organic ranking, competition level, and opportunity score. Product ads, marketing campaigns, advertisement groups, and so on can also be grouped together.

#4 Conversion prediction

Conversion prediction is not a straightforward operation because conversion rates are often in the single digits. It’s comparable to looking for a needle in a haystack. To increase your chances of success, you'll need a wealth of user behavior data from the past. Early behaviors connected to future conversion milestones can be determined based on this historical data.

Once you have identified people whose actions indicate a high possibility of conversion, you may prioritize and target them appropriately. In addition, this method is effective in identifying factors with the greatest impact on conversion. Depending on the site and its users, it may include a combination of industry, role, location, device kind, or any other combination of relevant dimensions.

How does Factors help with conversion prediction and optimization?

As the name suggests, Factors.ai is built upon an AI-powered analytics engine. Our proprietary ML algorithms empower markets to generate actionable insights from their data in a matter of seconds using AI-fueled Explain and Weekly insights. Curious to see our work in action? Find a good time here!

#5 Anomaly detection

The B2B SaaS marketing industry is rapidly evolving into a data-driven operation that involves near-real time iterations to campaigns and strategies. Naturally, this relies on a large, up-to-date volumes of data. Ad groups and keywords in display and search campaigns, for example, can be rather large and take part in hundreds of daily programmatic auctions; they also have their own unique conversion rates, budgets, returns on investment, and so on. That is,a  vast variety of figures and metrics that constantly fluctuate.

Generally, the fluctuations stay within the range of naturally occurring variances, but exceptions may be found. As a marketer, one must stay vigilant so as to quickly respond with appropriate actions and reactions.

Anomaly detection makes use of statistical analysis and automated decision making to notify marketers when critical KPIs such as conversion rate, revenue, and traffic depart too greatly from the norm. This method treats data as a statistical time series, allowing it to automatically detect seasonal and weekly patterns while simultaneously avoiding false positives. This allows for quick identification of data outliers and under or over performing efforts.

How does Factors help with Anomaly detection?

Factors provides robust, customizable KPI reporting functionality. Set your parameters and sit back as Factors automatically alerts you through Slack and Email notifications when your KPIs extend past your preconfigured range. Furthermore, unlock insights into which marketing efforts are performing, and which ones aren't. Attribution and Explain on Factors may also be used to detect the anomalies across keywords, firmographics, channels, campaigns and more

#6 Forecasting

Forecasting is everywhere: financial markets, economic indices, corporate sales, etc. So, it's no surprise that this technique can also forecast online traffic, conversion, revenue, and other metrics marketers care about. Similar to anomaly detection, forecasting uses historical data to predict trends. This, however, is not always possible and, as a result, forecasts will likely be inaccurate — at least to a certain degree.

In order to make interpretation of predicted results more flexible, forecasting techniques provide bands within which forecasted data can range with given probabilities. If uncertainty is properly accounted for, forecasting can be used as a technique to help you better adjust your future campaigns and targets.

How to implement advanced marketing analytics techniques?

Marketing teams can benefit from advanced marketing analytics throughout the entire marketing process. Advanced marketing analytics helps firms automate and optimize their marketing efforts one step past conventional marketing analytics. 

Gathering data from a larger variety of sources, not simply social media outlets, is an important part of deploying this type of analytics. More diverse data sets require more precise analysis if you want to get the most out of your data and make better decisions. There isn't a single business that has access to every piece of information it would need to make well-informed choices. Instead, firms should broaden their data collection to gain a deeper understanding of their field as a whole. 

Try to supplement your data with that of larger external data providers. As a result, you can more precisely grow your business and build more insightful models. You should also see data with a more prospective eye. It's conceivable that marketing and analytics models used in the past won't be useful for planning future efforts. Finding new connections between online and offline market aspects and impacts is more important than using past data. An analytics model that aids in taking more consequential choices requires a more in-depth examination of client behavior. 

Top-down data analysis is also crucial. By looking at the market as a whole, we may more easily identify a broader range of decision points from which to draw more predictive data. To get the most out of advanced analytics, granularity is essential.

The usefulness of data models can be increased by including the knowledge and experience of more people. The teams responsible for creating data models should include a wide variety of specialists. Data models that are both accurate and useful in practice benefit from the input of experts from a variety of disciplines. 

Large amounts of different data are ideal for advanced marketing analytics strategies. This is why before implementing a new analytics model, a company should thoroughly cleanse its historical data and set up its infrastructure.

How Factors can help your business?

Automation of ordinary data processing and integration of contemporary software solutions into your workflow are always prerequisites for advanced marketing analytics. Manual data manipulation requires far too much time on mechanical activities rather than focusing on the analysis itself. Furthermore, manual processing exposes the granularity of your findings to human error.

Factors assists businesses in automating marketing data processing and gathering advanced marketing analytics insights without the need for repetitive activities. The tool unifies data from a huge number of  marketing data sources, standardizes insights, and loads them into a single warehouse. Marketers can then quickly transfer data to Factors’ dedicated dashboards to create sophisticated charts and graphs. With numerous pre-designed and customizable dashboard templates at your disposal, you will gain a fresh perspective on your marketing activities and efficiently optimize your marketing ROI.

FAQs

What is advanced marketing analytics?

Advanced marketing analytics refers to a detailed examination of various marketing data utilized to show new customer behavior patterns, market trends, campaign performance concerns, and other significant insights.

Why is advanced marketing analytics important?

A company can find new markets for their products, expand their customer base, and increase revenue with the help of advanced sales and marketing analytics. Monitoring the success of marketing campaigns is essential for their continued success. Using advanced marketing analytics methods will help you fine-tune your campaigns and spend where it counts.

How does data analytics help in marketing?

With the help of data analytics, marketers can glean actionable insights into their data's performance. This data is useful for determining the channels used by customers and prospects, as well as the most profitable campaigns.

How Does Advanced Marketing Analytics Help CMOs?

The use of advanced marketing analytics allows businesses to make more informed predictions about the future and to spot emerging trends earlier. More reliable insights can be obtained from a larger pool of high-quality data with the help of this type of analytics. A CMO will have access to more actionable data, which should lead to more effective campaigns.

If you have hopped into this specific article, I will assume that you are currently looking for several video marketing ideas to stand out among the tough competition. If you still stick to outdated marketing strategies, other competitors will shine easily by outshining your brand. 

However, there is absolutely nothing to worry about. All you need to do is take a quick look at this write-up, and you will be able to uncover the plethora of ideas in no time. Making informed decisions will be easier than ever; stay tuned!

Video Marketing - What Does it Mean?

Before discussing the marketing ideas, let’s take a moment to grab some information on the term ‘video marketing.’ Well, it is an excellent tool that enables you to engage with your audience in the best possible manner.

By implementing this element with a video maker, you can now promote your products and services without breaking your bank. It is a cost-effective solution that tends to boost engagement on the digital and social channels, convert new customers into loyal clientele, and effortlessly educate your audience. Now, let’s talk about some statistics and numbers: 

• 93% of the shared videos have helped the companies build brand awareness among the masses. 
• According to 94% of business owners, videos have enabled them to boost their service or product understanding. 
• 81% of the leaders think that switching to video marketing has allowed them to increase sales. 
• 87% of company heads agree that videos have enhanced overall website traffic and engagement. 
• 82% think videos are a great way to increase dwell time. 

Another survey states that,

• Videos have increased brand awareness by 70%
• Videos have boosted sales by 34%
• Videos have paved the way for more traffic by 51%

Hopefully, you have now understood the massive impact of this video content in B2B sectors. 

Video Marketing- What Are the Marketing Ideas Convert Customers and Drive Demand?

Now, I will discuss some of the best ideas to help you rule the market and evolve as an absolute slayer. Check out the pointers stated below:

#1 Video Testimonials or Customer Stories

You can market your products and services by creating customer stories and testimonials in a video format. Since these types of content bring social proof in an open forum, it will persuade your clientele base to invest in your offerings and make a solid purchase. The honest opinions backed up by positive feedback will enable you to convert your new consumers into permanent ones. 

#2 Repurposing Your Existing Content

You can choose to make recycled videos from previous content that you have created for some other purpose. This idea will give you the scope to save your time, thus driving maximized value with minimal effort. Now, you might wonder what some ways of creating repurposed content are. Well, you can change the following formats into video content:

• Blog posts can be converted into educational videos. 
• Takeaways from live streams can be turned into on-demand video recaps. 
• Podcasts can be converted into expert interview videos. 
• Twitter chat replies can be converted into quick tips videos. 
• Event takeaways can be further developed into event recap videos. 
• Text-based case studies can be turned into event recap videos.  

Here, all you need to do is use an free video trimmer online to eliminate the unnecessary parts, thus limiting the overall period of the video. 

#3 Opt for How-to Videos

How-to or explainer videos are an excellent idea that can be used in the B2B context. Here, you will be able to educate your audience on the various functions performed by your products. Like this, your target customers will be able to gain maximum value after purchasing from your store.

The valuable information will help the individuals use the products without hassles or hindrances. However, you must keep these types of videos engaging and worthwhile.

#4 Behind the Scene Content

The behind the scene videos are a great way to expose individuals who strive hard to manufacture new products for their customers. These types of authentic content allow the users to build faith and trust in your brand. You can choose to post them on social media forums since they are an excellent platform that helps to create new bonds and relationships.

Using the iPhone, you can shoot casual footage, chitchats of your employers, and underproduced feelings; you will be able to portray top-notch authenticity in no time. A quick look behind your company’s curtain can drive demand to a new level.  

#5 Product Review Videos

With the help of product review videos, you can show your customer everything your company has to offer. Through these videos, you will get the fantastic opportunity to talk about the benefits and features of your products. This idea will expand your brand awareness, thus exposing you to new target audiences. 

#6 Webinars

Webinars allow companies to showcase their upcoming products, generate new leads and build maximized authority. According to a specific study, it is pretty evident that nearly 54% of B2B professionals rely on weekly webinars. By investing in webinars and talking about super relevant topics, you will be able to win millions of hearts out there. 

#7 Videos Building Brand Awareness

These videos speak volumes about your brand rather than the broad range of products and services. It will allow your customers to learn more about the visions and missions of your organization. 

Video Marketing- What Are the Benefits?

Some of the benefits are listed below:

• It will improve your visibility on social media forums. 
• People will be able to understand your product without getting confused. 
• You will be able to enjoy top-notch engagement and exposure. 
• Standing out among the crowd will be extremely easy, similar to a smooth cakewalk. 
• Your websites will rank higher in no time. 

Wrapping Up

By implementing these ideas, you can now choose to steal the spotlight and acquire an unbeatable position in the market. So start generating creative video content now!

In recent blog posts, we’ve talked about marketing analytics, why they are important for your business, and which marketing analytics tools you should be tracking depending on certain business goals. But gaining data insights is only the second step in the process. 

Before you derive insights from your firm’s multiple sources of data from different vendors, be it through reports or visualizations, bridging the gap between data collection and clean data insights is essential. 

Here’s an example - you’re a marketing and advertising firm that receives a ton of data from multiple vendors and clients, all of which send their data using different methods of data collection and sorting. Standardizing all these reports and graphs can be an exhausting task, taking up precious time and resources. 

Don’t you wish you had a tool that could help you integrate multiple data sources into a single platform that you could then use for cutting-edge insights?

Enter: Supermetrics. 

While this tool works quite differently from standard analytics tools such as Google Analytics, it’s been widely used and recommended by B2B firms and their marketing teams - simply because it simplifies the process of having to manually transfer data from multiple sheets and files into a single actionable platform for better analysis. 

Supermetrics Features

Supermetrics, if defined simply, is a data-automation tool that allows you to pull data from various sources (such as social media platforms, Google Adwords, and Google Analytics) and feed it into a platform that can help with data organization and insights, such as MS Excel, Google Data Studio, etc.). 

The reason why Supermetrics has proven to be a popular and seamless platform is to bridge the gaps between data and database/analytics software. Let’s now take a look at some of the features Supermetrics is best known for - 

1. Eliminate the need for manual copy-and-paste 

When we talk about B2B company data, we’re not talking about a couple of Excel sheets, but an enormous amount of data from multiple platforms that the brand uses. Ideally, a B2B brand establishes its presence on various platforms such as Linkedin, Instagram, Google Ads, and Twitter Campaigns, to name a few. 

Above all, it can be extremely tricky to ensure that all of the data pulled from these platforms is regularly updated, to avoid any snags or data errors while feeding it for data insights or performance reports. Supermetrics helps with exactly that. Once you set up your Supermetrics account, it automatically starts gathering data and pasting it into any tool you opt for analytics, such as Excel or Google Data Studio. 

Be it weekly or yearly reports, Supermetrics makes sure you spend a lot less time on the grunt work, and utilize that time to better study and understand the data the tool has pulled, resulting in better, actionable insights. 

Pull data from hundreds of sites and platforms

One of the biggest advantages of Supermetrics is that it can pull data from multiple sources in a matter of seconds, and create reports that otherwise would have taken days to prepare. Here are a few of the sites and platforms that Supermetrics can set up to pull data from daily 

• Facebook Ads 
• Google Ads
• Criteo 
• Taboola.
• Linkedin Ad Campaigns 
• Twitter Ad Campaigns 
• Hubspot 
• Instagram 

And on the other side of the process, here are the platforms that Supermetrics feeds your data into so that you can immediately create reports, sort, filter, and study reports from the data that you no longer have to manually grab and drop from the channels mentioned above. 

• MS Excel 
• Snowflake 
• Google Sheets 
• Google Data Studio 
• API 
• BigQuery 

3. Marketing Data Visualization 

Once Supermetrics has pulled data from one platform, it feeds it into another. However, while doing so, it creates visualizations that can be customized according to the brand’s needs. 

For example, if you feed data from your Google AdWords campaign into an Excel spreadsheet, Supermetrics will automatically convert your campaign performance data into line charts, bar graphs, and or plotted graphs, according to your needs. In the event of updated data, the platform immediately updates its visualizations, instead of you having to manually update your database every time there’s an update or change. 

Apart from these features, Supermetrics is commonly used to track PPC campaign data across various platforms and create automated reports that can be fed into brand new presentation software such as Microsoft PowerPoint, eliminating quite a lot of manual effort. 

Limitations with Supermetrics 

Just as any other analytics or data-grabbing software, Supermetrics comes with its pros and cons. Before making a choice, it is important to know all of these pros and cons, so that you can align your brand needs with the features of the software, and make an informed decision. 

1. No clean-ups for marketing data errors

We talked about how Supermetrics can pull data from hundreds of platforms in one click, and regularly update the database platform you’ve chosen for insights. But if you have to ensure that all your data is clean and filtered through regularly for errors, you might just have to do that manually. 

Supermetrics as a platform does not help weed out any data errors. All it does is pull data from one platform, paste it onto another, and create visualizations for the data received. Platforms like ChannelMix help set up rules and conditions for data grabbing, so that all of your data passes through a certain filter, ensuring a slim chance of data errors in your final reports. 

2. Unintuitive marketing analytics software 

While Supermetrics as a tool is extremely useful, learning how to navigate through the platform and use its features according to your brand needs can be a bit tricky. 

Lots of user reviews state how steep the learning curve is for Supermetrics, and that learning how to integrate Supermetrics with multiple sites can be quite time-consuming and difficult. 

3. Lack of scalability

An important distinction one must make is that while Supermetrics is an excellent data-grabber, it does not provide any services for long-term data storage, unlike data warehouses. In the event that your brand wants to scale up, or derive long-term insights from past data, it may be time to consider another tool. 

The reason behind this limitation is that Supermetrics is simply concerned with pulling and feeding data from one platform to another. It does not focus on long-term data storage that multiple teams in your organization can focus on. 

It might be easy in the short term to set up a data warehouse with Supermetrics, but since the warehouse is not part of the product itself, you’ll spend a lot more time, money, and effort trying to maintain and update the warehouse from time to time. 

4. Supermetrics pricing

A make-or-break factor for many organizations, the cost is one of the features where Supermetrics falls short when compared to other data-grabbing tools. To ensure you pay for the service you need, and don’t end up paying more than your budget allocates, make sure to check out the pricing page on Supermetrics’s website, compare their pricing with other tools, and book a free trial of the tool so that you know exactly what you’re paying for if you choose to opt for Supermetrics in the future. 

How Does Factors Help with B2B marketing analytics and revenue attribution? 

1. Data-Grabbing and Insights across the customer journey 

While Supermetrics is a data-grabbing tool, a robust marketing effort needs more than just data-grabbing. While Supermetrics is a connector, simply relying on such a software tool does not provide a comprehensive viewpoint that you can use to optimize your efforts. Factors, apart from pulling data from multiple sites and platforms, helps analyze and optimize efforts with KPI reporting, customer journey funnels, and revenue attribution, to name a few.. helps with connecting the data you’ve pulled and shows you just how much value and traffic each of your channels is bringing in. 

While data-grabbing is an excellent way to understand the trends in channel performance, Factors help understand why a source/platform performed as well as it did, and how you can use those insights to build a better marketing strategy. 

2. Customizable Attribution Modeling

Just as every business has its own goals and needs, keeping a close eye on the channels and platforms that can help you get there is essential. While pulling in data from multiple sources, it can be difficult and time-consuming to figure out which source is bringing in the most profitable audience, and which source(s) need more work. 

With Factors’ customizable attribution model, you can select to track and study your sales pipeline the way you want to, according to your goals. To read more about attribution and why you need to use it in your B2B marketing strategy, visit our Blog section! 

3. Cost Effectiveness 

The Factors pricing model is built for all types and sizes of teams so that you pay only for the services you need, based on your team size. Cost-effectiveness is a make-or-break factor for many brands, and not choosing the right tool for the right price does more harm than good in the long term. 

4. User-friendly interface

One of the biggest advantages Factors holds over Supermetrics is how easy it is to use, even if you’re just starting in the world of analytics and data insights. Our interface is created keeping the customer in mind and can be picked up quite easily. 

Wrapping Up 

There are hundreds of analytics and data-grabbing tools that you might opt for for your B2B brand. However, understanding what your brand needs are, your ideal budget, the time allotted to learning the software, and the quality of insights gained with the help of your chosen software are all factors you should keep in mind while opting for a tool. 

Looking to learn more about HockeyStack’s pricing, features, and comparisons? You’re in the right place. This article is the product of raiding the internet to highlight everything you need to know about HockeyStack. Let’s jump in. 

What is HockeyStack?

HockeyStack is a B2B analytics & attribution platform that integrates with your ads, website, CRM, and more to identify how campaigns and content are influencing conversions across the customer journey. Here’s a quick breakdown of what HockeyStack offers:

• Multi-touch attribution
• Website analytics
• Predictive analytics
• IP-identification
• Unified tracking across campaigns, website, CRM, etc
• Goals, funnels, and segment tracking
• Account-based customer journeys
• Custom dashboards and reports
• Surveys
• LinkedIn Impression tracking

HockeyStack Pricing

[December 2023 Update] HockeyStack has recently revised its pricing to $1399/mo for up to 10,000 unique visitors. Here's a breakdown of what HockeyStack's growth plan includes on time of writing:

[Aug 2023 Update] HockeyStack’s pricing plans start at $949/mo for up to 10,000 unique website visitors and 10 seats. This starting price is somewhere between Dreamdata ($599/mo) and Infinigrow’s ($1,500/mo) starting plans. Not the cheapest or the most expensive attribution solution out there.

As with most products in this category, HockeyStack pricing is based on the volume of traffic or users you’re tracking. You’ll have to request a demo to find the exact commercials for your business. 

HockeyStack Reviews

Generally, HockeyStack is well rated for its wide range of customization but a few reviews find HockeyStack marginally unintuitive and relatively unrefined.  

HockeyStack Alternatives

Here’s a quick list of leading HockeyStack alternatives for your consideration. Looking for an in-depth analysis of the strengths and limitations of these options? Read on here: Top 7 HockeyStack alternatives 

• Factors.ai
• Dreamdata
• Adobe Marketo Measure (Bizible)
• Attribution App
• Ruler Analytics
• Calibermind
• FullCircle Insights

HockeyStack Comparison: Why Factors Over HockeyStack

HockeyStack is great at what it does. It provides robust attribution functionality, a wide range of customizations and integrations, and well-reviewed customer support. That being said, when compared to a similarly priced attribution product like Factors, HockeyStack seems to fall short in terms of features, usability, and cost-effectiveness. 

Accordingly, here are three reasons why Factors may make more sense for you:

1. Product features

In addition to the standard attribution and analytics features shared by both solutions, Factors delivers a wide range of features to help GTM teams refine customer journeys and drive conversions. Mainly:

1. LinkedIn and G2 Intent signals: While both tools offer IP-based account identification, Factors captures intent signals across website, LinkedIn impressions, AND G2 engagement. This means that you can identify anonymous accounts and track their cross-channel engagement more holistically. 

In addition, Factors integrates with MAPs, LinkedIn, and more via Webhooks to activate trigger-based actions. This includes automated LinkedIn matched audience list building, automated mail sequence activation based on engagement and intent signals & more.

2. Path analysis for aggregated customer journey mapping 

3. Account scoring Factors empower tailor-made account scoring configurations based on engagement across website, LinkedIn impressions, and G2 so teams can qualify and prioritize high-intent accounts accurately.

4. Anomaly detection and real-time alerts via mail, Slack or MS Teams

2. Usability

Factors and HockeyStack are both among the most customizable B2B attribution solutions out there. The ability to customize KPIs, properties, dashboards, and events is extremely valuable for teams looking to tailor their reporting for their business-specific requirements.

That being said, users find Factors to be user-friendly and conducive to self-service. Fortunately, both solutions provide comprehensive onboarding support and customer success management, so you should still be able to derive great value from either one. Still, user experience and product usability is something to keep in mind when making a purchase decision. 

3. Cost-effectiveness

Finally, we arrive at cost. While HockeyStack plans start at $950 [As of Dec 2023, HockeyStack pricing has been revised to $1399/mo] for up to 10,000 monthly visitors, Factors offers a much lower barrier to entry with paid plans starting as low as $99/mo. Moreover, Factors provides a free plan to get you started with our basic offerings. 

Learn more about Factors pricing here: www.factors.ai/pricing

Overall, Factors is the more cost-effective option for early-stage teams looking to start out their marketing analytics and attribution journey. Given the additional features discussed above, it's more bang for your buck than other alternatives, including HockeyStack. 

Looking to see if Factors would make the right fit for your attribution needs? Book a demo with us today!

As a B2B marketing team, there are a few common mistakes that should be avoided. Not focusing on branding enough, or ignoring the potential solid audience research holds for your brand can all negatively affect your brand's growth in the long run. 

The growth of online marketing strategies, various tools, and software, and even a shift in audience preferences have all led to a change in B2B business's marketing journeys. However, there are timeless mistakes that every B2B marketer should know about while crafting a marketing strategy. 

In this blog, we'll cover the top 6 mistakes that a majority of B2B marketers make - mistakes you should try not to make throughout your marketing journey. 

#1 A Lack of Focus on Branding

You may think, "What's branding got anything to do with B2B? Isn't branding only needed when interacting with a non-business audience like B2C brands?" This notion could not have been farther from the truth. Most B2B brands do not focus on branding as much as they should, since they do not see the contribution it provides to your brand and your customers in the long run. Put simply - branding is important. Creating a strong connection with your present and potential customers with a solid brand identity, voice, and emotion-centric branding efforts is the best way you as marketing can avoid making this first mistake. Tips: 

• Creating a brand from scratch takes the same (if not more) amount of effort as creating a company. 
• Emotion is key. The more you relate to your customers' feelings, emotions, and needs, the more customer-centric your brand will be able to be. 
• Consistency is key. Creating a brand is not an overnight process, so putting in effort regularly is the best thing you can do for your B2B brand. 

#2 Being unaware of your true target audience

Be it a business or an individual on social media, knowing what your target audience is essential for B2B success. B2B brands often miss out on defining their target audience early on in their marketing efforts, simply because it does not seem important at that stage. However, businesses too, comprise your target audience and need personalized, impactful marketing efforts that might motivate them to opt for your brand's products/services. Understanding your target audience is highly useful for your marketing, advertising, sales, product development, and even service departments, as the better you know who and what your audience comprises, the better you will be able to cater to their needs. 

Tip: Buyer personas are a must. Take some time out to divide your customers into personas that you can use to create better targeted and more efficient marketing campaigns. After all, better B2B marketing efforts potentially lead to better brand and revenue growth! 

#3 Using unnecessary jargon 

Often, B2B brands (and marketers) use unnecessary jargon to sound more "authoritative and professional" in front of their target audience. However, this is the biggest mistake you could make as a B2B marketer. Content marketing efforts such as a company blog, weekly newsletters, free industry resources, and whitepapers are a goldmine for B2B brands. No matter how useful and valuable the content inside each of these may be, using jargon and complicated terms to interact with your audience will be nothing but negative for your brand growth. 

Keeping it simple, not bland, is a mantra every B2B marketer should know. 

Here are a couple of ways to stop making this mistake.  

• Write like your audience. Conduct thorough research on the types of content your audience prefers, and create content accordingly. It always helps to keep in mind their preferred level of technicality, subject understanding, and voice in mind!
• Ensure you ask for lots of feedback from your audience after they view/interact with the content you've put out. Asking for feedback before publishing the content is a great way to ensure you don't publish content that is not audience-friendly in the long run. 

#4 Analytics, analytics, analytics
(or a lack thereof) 

As any B2B marketing will tell you, analytics tools are THE way to track and measure brand performance over time. Be it website conversions, newsletter sign-ups, or even the number of visitors that signed up for a demo call, analytics are essential for a rocking marketing strategy. B2B brands often ignore this aspect of marketing, which is perhaps the most important one - tracking results. Understanding which channels are bringing in better, more promising leads, and which channels need optimizing are useful insights to have while allocating budgets and brainstorming strategies for each of these channels.

Opting for the right analytics software based on your brand needs is equally important, and the only way you can do this is by conducting lots of research on the various options available. Social media platforms too, provide separate analytics dashboards for business accounts, and these are a great place to understand audience behavior. 

#5 A Poor Definition of your Brand’s USP  

Your brand's USP, or Unique Selling Proposition, is what sets it apart from your competitors. Not understanding your USP leads to poor use of marketing potential, and a potential dip in the amount of traffic your sales funnel sees. What's more, marketing your USP well creates a lasting impression on your audience, which is nothing but beneficial for your B2B brand. Understand your audience's needs, tie them in with your USP, and market it in a way that makes it about what your brand can do for them. 

#6 Ignoring UI and Design

Here's a TL;DR - If your User Interface sucks, you're not doing it right. Apart from your service or product, your overall user experience is what helps clinch the deal. Be it a mobile application or your website, focusing on a smooth, user-friendly, and responsive design is key for a glowing UX. 

Ensure you test out all of your website pages, applications, and landing pages on multiple devices and network speeds. Optimize your images and videos so that they load quickly on slower networks, and ensure that your website is accessible (and readable) on both desktop and mobile devices.

What is a product-led growth strategy?

Product-led growth (PLG) is a business strategy and technique that sets the product as the major engine of customer acquisition, activation, satisfaction, retention, and scalable expansion. Customers remain loyal to a brand that offers an innovative and personalized product experience. It most likely happens when all of a company's digital-facing teams—marketing, product, customer success, and more—unite around product-led growth.

Due to Product Led Growth’s pivotal position in some of the most successful SaaS start-ups in recent times (Notion, Dropbox, Canva, Figma, Slack and Dropbox), PLG is being increasingly considered by high-growth teams as a winning growth strategy.

A closer examination of PLG, reveals a fundamentally new approach to product development. One that makes the product the star of the show throughout the whole user experience. Salespeople, marketers, and engineers all play supporting roles in a successful assisted sale, but the product is the star of the show. User-driven virality, activation and engagement journeys, and the first steps toward an assisted sale are all examples of this.

Why is product-led growth the future of SaaS?

In contrast to sales-led organizations whose sole objective is to move a buyer from A to B in a sales cycle, product-led companies invert the typical sales paradigm. Product-driven businesses make this possible by providing the consumer with the "keys" to the product and assisting them in experiencing a meaningful consequence while using the product. At this point, upgrading to a premium subscription is an obvious choice.

On the surface, product-led development may appear to be a straightforward model for your buyer to test before purchasing. However, upon closer inspection, product-led growth is an entirely novel strategy for expanding a SaaS business.

Product-led growth entails that every team in your organization influences the product. Your marketing team will inquire, "How can we develop a demand flywheel for our product?" Your sales staff will inquire, "How can we use this product to qualify leads?" Your customer success team asks, "How can we design a product that facilitates customer success beyond our wildest dreams?" By focusing every team on the product, you establish a culture based on enduring customer value."

By focusing on the product throughout the organization, product-led businesses frequently gain:

• By letting your prospects onboard themselves, you can drastically minimize the time-to-value and sales cycle of your prospects.
• Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) by allowing users to upgrade independently.
• Higher Revenue Per Employee (RPE): Less hand-holding results in increased profit margins per customer.

Product-led growth isn't just about disrupting "how" SaaS businesses sell; it's your only means of survival.

Key product-led growth metrics

It's critical that everyone in your team understands and adheres to the same set of performance goals. While there are new measures to rally behind in a product-led growth model, many on this list may sound familiar — many SaaS organizations already do prefer to track product-led growth metrics.

1. Activation Rate: The percentage of users that have found meaningful value in a product.

2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): An estimate of how much income a single customer will bring in for your company over the course of your engagement.

3. Acquisition: The number of users who have signed up for your free trial/tier.

4. Product Qualified Lead (PQL): A product qualified lead (PQL) is a lead who has derived significant value from your product via a free trial or freemium model. These customers are primed for an upsell.

5. Net Revenue Churn: This metric, which is commonly represented as a percentage, reflects the amount of money lost after accounting for new and expansion revenue.

6. Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): This metric is excellent for gauging the general health of your company. To determine this, divide the monthly recurring revenue by the total number of clients.

7. TTV: The amount of time it takes new users to reach their Activation moment is known as the Time-to-Value (TTV). The more quickly you can activate users, the more likely it is that they will remain active. The key objective of a successful onboarding process is to minimize TTV.

8. Expansion Revenue: One of the most crucial levers for SaaS growth, expansion revenue serves as an anti-churn strategy. Revenue from existing customers that is created through upsells, add-ons, cross-sells, and other strategies is measured by expansion revenue.

9. Free-to-Paid Conversion Rate: The percentage of trial users that have upgraded to a paid membership.

Is your product fit for product led growth?

If your organization possesses the following traits, you might want to employ a product-led growth approach to increase product adoption: In fact, a PLG approach can influence your marketing, product optimization, pricing, and sales strategies.

• The product market conditions are favorable for the proposed strategy to be implemented successfully.
• The user views the product as a "highest-value-product" that they wish to use on a frequent basis, which increases its perceived value.
• The user is able to quickly and easily achieve large ongoing benefit with little to no assistance from corporate staff.
• Rather than setting the price, "paywalls" in a product, track how much value the user is receiving and adjust their pricing accordingly.
• Market, sell, and onboard new consumers are all made possible by the product.
• The goal of marketing is to get people to interact with the product rather than the sales team.
• A network effect is already incorporated into the product.
• Companies that use the product have a vocal proponent who works tirelessly to spread the word about how fantastic it is.

Modelling growth around a product-driven approach

You can escape the onslaught of increasing client acquisition expenses and declining customer willingness to pay for your product by focusing on product-led growth. You must do the following actions in order to create a successful product-led business:

• Learn to articulate the benefits that working with you can offer to your clients.
• Make sure you express this value to your customer in a way that is pertinent to them and the situation they are in.
• Ensure that you deliver on that value.

How does the Product-led growth model fare in comparison to other models?

Growth models commonly used by companies include one or a combination of the following:

• Sales-led
• Marketing-led
• Product-led

Each of the three models has a different internal alignment. Companies that are mostly sales-driven are designed to help the sales team succeed as the company's principal revenue generator. We ask, "Will this help the sales team win more deals?" while making decisions about anything from employee training to software purchases to marketing strategies. 

The primary goal of marketing-driven businesses is to persuade customers of the worth of a product and to meet their demands. A marketing team is supported by the firm in its attempts to attract customers and generate leads. After conducting customer research and advertising campaigns, the marketing staff has a key role in bringing new customers into the fold. Marketing initiatives can make all the difference in pipeline and growth in a highly competitive market where items are tough to distinguish.

Prospects must be told the value of a product explicitly under each of these approaches. Product-led businesses, on the other hand, place an emphasis on showcasing the true worth of their offerings. For example, product-driven organizations may encourage prospects to engage with the product immediately—in the form of a free trial or "freemium" subscription—instead of investing extensively in outbound sales. Allowing potential customers to test out a high-quality product before they buy it enables them to experience its advantages first-hand. It is unnecessary to persuade a buyer about the genuine value of a product created with this mindset.

Product-led businesses prioritize minimizing customer acquisition costs (CAC) to the greatest extent possible. Recruiting and training a large sales force is costly. Both traditional and digital marketing tactics that are of high-quality demand substantial and consistent financial commitments. However, becoming product-driven does not entail abandoning all traditional sales and marketing tactics. It is more important to be strategic with your investments and vision.

You still require a sales team to assist with selling and a marketing team to generate demand. But product-driven expansion increases the effectiveness of both sales-driven and marketing-driven activities. Ultimately, it is much simpler to sell and promote a product that customers adore than to sell and market an average product.

How does your business benefit from a Product-led growth model?

Are you unsure if product-led growth is the right path for your company? There are some definite advantages to product-led growth, even if it isn't ideal in every situation.

Accelerated growth - Rapid acceptance and expansion are the primary motivations for using product-led growth in business. To put it another way, you're getting to the point and decreasing the barriers to entry by allowing users to access the product for no charge.

Scalability - Slack and Shopify are two of the most successful startups in the world, but scaling up may be a challenge. If you're looking for rapid expansion, product-driven growth is often the best option. This is because product-driven companies can focus their resources on onboarding and serving customers while their competitors are focusing on developing their sales organizations.

Reduced Cost of Acquisition - Using a product-led growth approach significantly decreases a company's marketing expense because customer acquisition channels are already embedded into the product. Overall acquisition expenses are reduced as a result.

Better Rates of Retention - Product-led growth ensures that user expectations are aligned with the capabilities of your product, ensuring that your product is a success. A better fit for the user is created, which leads to increased user retention over time.

Customer Satisfaction - Growing a business with a product is mostly dependent on word-of-mouth advertising. It's not your company's job to persuade customers to buy your goods. It's your customers, not you, who drive adoption.

Customers are likely to have great things to say about this product because of its emphasis on providing real value. Other customers read these ratings and thoughts, which starts a virtuous circle of purchases. Product-led growth enterprises benefit from the fact that many consumers prefer to investigate things they've heard about online rather than in person.

Transition to product-led: What does it mean to be product led

Not only is the price model changing, but so are many other aspects of the firm as a whole.

Customers can test a product before purchasing it thanks to free trials offered by many companies.

As a result, product onboarding experiences are being improved so that clients may begin experiencing the product's value much sooner.

Product firms devote a lot of time and attention to actually distinguishing themselves from their competitors by uncovering fresh client problems and value to offer.

To deliver even greater value to a more narrowly focused group of clients, businesses are increasingly focusing on a smaller set of distinct demographics and the difficulties they face.

The distinctive value proposition is the focus of the messaging developed by the marketing and sales teams.

Optimizing pricing models around customer experience and providing more options, such as subscription models, is becoming more commonplace.

The term "value" appears in all of them. Customers churn and move on to the next product if they don't feel their demands are addressed and the product doesn't deliver value.

In order to become product-led, the first step is to discover what customers value the most about their products. What are the most common issues customers have with the product? What features and functionalities are absolutely essential to your clients in order to keep them engaged over the long term?

Companies can use this information to improve their product offering, onboarding experience, marketing and sales message, pricing structures, and trial choices so that customers can experience the product's unique value proposition at every stage of their customer journey.

Looking forward…

When brands correctly use product-led growth frameworks, they acquire an unfair competitive edge and experience substantially lower Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). A good framework will also help reduce friction in the user onboarding process, which might impede the growth of your product. 

But beyond the framework, product-led growth is really about knowing your customers' demands and identifying market gaps.

Content is king, and a solid content marketing strategy is your key to B2B success. 

According to studies, over 88% of all B2B brands currently utilize content marketing for their everyday efforts, while another 76% of them intend to do so in the future as well. 

As per definition, content marketing refers to using a strategy that involves creating and sharing valuable, meaningful content (such as videos, articles, and infographics) with your target audience. This sharing promotes audience engagement, value-addition to your marketing efforts, and above all, a positive brand image.

To explain this better, here's a thumb rule - the more value you provide to your customer, the more likely they are to opt for your products and services. Half-hearted marketing efforts are a thing of the past now, and paying attention to your content strategy is just as important as other aspects of your branding journey. 

However, here's a question that you might ask yourself while starting with content marketing - "What metrics do I use to track the performance of my content strategy?" 

Well, your search ends here. 

In this blog, we'll cover the top content marketing metrics you must track, why these metrics are important as well as FAQs on content marketing metrics. 

What Are Content Marketing Metrics and Why Are They Important?

The biggest factor that sets content marketing apart from other strategies is that its goal is not to promote the brand's products or services but to provide value to the customer's journey. 

Engaging your audience's interest with industry insights, product reviews, Ask-And-Answer events, infographics, and niche-specific content works wonders for your sales funnel.

The first step of a marketing funnel is "Awareness". While a traditional ad campaign or search engine campaign may drive in customers, a robust content marketing strategy will hook your audience right in, and keep them engaged for a long time. As mentioned above, the more value you provide to your audience, the more curious and eager they will be to consider your brand while opting for a product/service. 

To measure your strategy's success, you must track certain metrics that can help evaluate past performance, predict future trends, as well as help you optimize your current efforts.

6 Content Marketing Metrics You Must Track 

Impressions 

This metric is particularly useful on social media platforms. Put simply, the number of impressions your post garners is the number of times your audience has viewed it. A higher number of impressions indicates a higher level of reach and potential user engagement. 

Sometimes, understanding what type of content your audience would like to see on their feed plays a vital role in the impressions gained. Hosting regular polls and surveys can help your brand deliver content that your audience wants, likes, and shares with their network. 

Page Traffic 

Page traffic or website traffic is the most important indicator to see how well your content is performing across various channels. This metric is closely related to others such as CTR, which we'll take up later in this blog.

 Apart from tracking how much page traffic you're getting, it's important to know where this traffic is coming from. Is it your company blog page? Is it your social media posts that are bringing in more users? Is it your newsletter or your tutorials on YouTube? Understanding which content channels are bringing in the most (and least) number of customers is a handy insight to have. 

Once you know which efforts need optimization and which need more (or less!) investment, you can modify and create a better content strategy accordingly. 

CTR 

Your Click-Through-Rate measures the number of clicks your ad/content receives, as compared to the number of times it is shown. Are your customers visiting your blog page via your latest Instagram post? Is your audience signing up for that newsletter you advertised in your latest email? Is your audience clicking on your website for your latest paid ads campaign on a popular search engine? Did they reach your product page through an infographic?

Measuring your CTR provides insights into whether your strategy is successful at nudging your audience into the next step of your sales funnel, or whether there are gaps and leaks in the funnel that you need to fix. 

Conversion 

You've set up a content marketing strategy, and are driving in a good amount of traffic to your website and social media pages. But what next? 

Measuring how many of these visitors are converting into leads, and how many leads are converting into paying customers is an essential metric to track. 

Enter conversion. 

Your conversion rate measures what percentage of your audience in a certain stage of your sales funnel is "converting" into users in the next stage. A higher conversion rate is an excellent indicator of your strategy's success, while a lower one indicates the need for optimization of your current strategy. 

If your content does not provide any real value to your customers' journey, you can expect a dip in your conversion rates as well as overall website traffic.

Tip: Pay attention to the path your customers take before they make a purchase, i.e., the touchpoints that are most effective in the conversion process for better insights. Here's how you can use Factors.ai for the same.

SEO metrics 

Where there's digital marketing, there's SEO. If your content is created optimized for SEO( or Search Engine Optimization), it will rank much higher on relevant keyword searches on both search engines and special media platforms.

Identifying top keywords that are relevant to your brand or content group, using keywords in your website copy, meta descriptions, headings, subheadings, and even alternate text help boost organic reach. For example, a blog on dog food will stand a higher chance of ranking on Google's first page if its heading says "The Best Foods For Your Dog" than "Feeding Your Dog". 

SEO metrics such as keyword search volume and page rankings help you understand which keywords need to be worked upon, which keywords your content is ranking well for, and which sections of your website or social media page need to be optimized for better organic reach. 

Content Shares 

"We just went viral!" - the one sentence every brand wants to hear after posting content on digital platforms. Be it social media or search engines, aiming for a high amount of shares from your audience is at the top of every content marketer's list. For search engines like Google, the more your content (such as blogs) is shared, the more authority it is assigned, leading to a higher search ranking the next time a user searches for related keywords or phrases. 

A good way to build authority and boost shares is by using backlinking strategies. Backlinks are created when one website links to another. For example, the statistic we mentioned at the very start of the blog is linked to a page by the Content Marketing Institute. For social media platforms, creating bite-sized content that your audience will want to share with their network is the best way to increase page awareness and boost traffic. 

The takeaways? 

1. Make sure your content is share-worthy, i.e., of high quality and adds value to your customer's journey. 
2. Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks 

User Engagement 

Be it email marketing campaigns or your latest Reel on Instagram, tracking and studying user engagement is the best way to understand how well (and how often) your users interact with your content. 

One can track email open rate, likes, shares, page follows reposts, and retweets, as well as sign-ups for notifications about your upcoming posts. However, an important aspect of audience engagement that most brands miss out on is this - interact with your audience regularly. 

Respond to their comments, answer their queries, and host Q&A sessions on your social media pages. Engaging with both the brand and its content on various platforms creates an excellent customer ecosystem, boosting engagement rates, brand awareness, and a positive brand image. 

FAQs 

How can I measure content marketing metrics? 

One can measure such metrics with the help of analytics software, such as Google Analytics, Factors, or Oribi. These tools can be customized according to your campaign goals, content channels, campaign types, etc. For social media platforms, keep an eye on your analytics dashboard that tracks user traffic, post impressions, total reach, social media campaign metrics, and more. 

Why are content marketing metrics important? 

Tracking these metrics helps you measure how well your content strategy is working across different channels, where you need to optimize your efforts, and most importantly, they help you understand audience behavior better. 

Wrapping Up 

Content marketing is becoming every brand's top priority, simply because of the potential, it carries for brand growth and audience engagement. Measuring your strategy's performance with these metrics is the best way to know what's working well for your brand, and which efforts need optimization.