Factors Blog

Search Engine Optimization

It is reported that 75% of users never visit the second page on their search results.  As search results become increasingly concise and filtered, it’s easy to forget how ruthless and saturated search engine rankings can be. Hence, it isn’t an understatement that the accessibility of your page on a search engine should be an integral precursor for your marketing value proposition. Accordingly,  marketers are  prioritising SEO as part of their inbound efforts. This post expands upon the theory, practice, and importance of SEO in an ever-growing digital marketplace. 

What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, refers to the process of increasing the likelihood of your website, content, product, etc. appearing close to the top of  your SERP — search engine results page. The objective is to direct  more traffic to your webpage by increasing its ranking on a user’s search engine index, either organically or with minimal monetary investment.

Search engine results page or SERP is a constantly evolving geography.  Search results — especially those pertaining to inquiries now feature quick answers and knowledge panels that direct clicks away from low-ranked domains. For instance, if you were to google ‘marketing attribution’, you would be presented with a quick answer in the form of a short description directly below.  Additionally, other relevant, consolidated information is presented on the right within knowledge panels. Note that Google and many other search engines prioritise having their users spend more time on their SERP without having them navigate away as much. This is why marketers need to capitalise on their rich results and SERP ranking.

CRAWLABILITY AND INDEXING

Before we look at what your search engine prioritizes when ranking, it’s well worth understanding what crawlers are and how search engine indexing works:

Crawling is the process of your search engine sending out crawlers, which are bots that are used to discover new web pages. The crawlers start by following a certain number of web pages followed by then routinely navigating content and new links within these web pages. Thereby discovering a series of new web pages which it reports back to its respective server. A website’s crawlability thus refers to a crawler’s viability in a website or web page. More on increasing crawlability below.

All this information that the crawlers obtain is then stored in a database known as a search engine index. The data is then organised, analysed, and prepped for retrieval on a search engine results page — this process is known as search engine indexing.

The Ranking Algorithm: PageRank

Before indexed information is retrieved into a search engine results page, it is ranked by several factors in order to obtain the most relevant sources of information. While this piece will cover some critical success factors for your SEO, it is important to understand that Google ranks their websites based on relevancy and an algorithm. Understanding the algorithm is fairly complicated as it is continually evolving. That being said, PageRank is an algorithm that is still being used by Google to rank websites and will help provide an idea of how the ranking algorithm works.

PageRank uses an algorithm that helps rank web pages based on their relative importance. It does this by estimating how many times a web page is visited or linked from other web pages and also measures the quality of these links. For example, your web page is more likely to be ranked higher if it is linked by  relatively important web pages — like Forbes or the NYT — than it is if it was linked by many less "relevant" web pages — like The Onion or ArticleIFY.

The importance of a web page is assessed using a random surfer model and a damping factor that estimates how many times a web page is visited by a random surfer and assigns a percentage to all web pages visited. All you need to know is that the model and damping factor helps eliminate any way in which people can artificially inflate their web page’s importance.

SEO CSF — CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS

This segment will explain a few critical success factors for your SEO in the form of good keyword practices, indexing and crawlability, and more:

Keyword CSFs

Keywords play a surprisingly significant role when it comes to SERP ranking. Certain niche keywords could be the reason your web page is ranked higher in a SERP. But what keywords should you use? Before you choose your keywords, you need to establish your search intent. Understanding your web traffic, and what they’re looking for is key when it comes to search intent. Ask yourself what people would specifically search for and what words or phrases they’d use — for instance, 8% of all search queries are in the form of questions.
Once you have an idea of some appropriate keywords, it would help to know what their search volume is. You could administer the help of a keyword research tool — like Jaaxy, GrowthBar, SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, etc., which are tools that  help gauge how popular/relevant certain keywords are. They could even compare and recommend other related keywords.
The largest barrier here is the competition of high volume and short-tail keywords — or search phrases consisting of only one or two words. Industry-leading brands are often ranked higher for short-tailed keywords due to their relative importance. However, there are some advantages in using long-tail keywords (i.e. search phrases that are longer with three to five words). The consensus is that, while high volume and short-tail keywords tend to involve highly-competitive broad search queries, long-tail keywords account for more convertible traffic as their search phrases are specific. Hence, you’re likely to garner more traffic with niche low volume, long-tail keywords than if you were to compete using high volume keywords. For example, you’re more likely to earn traffic from a search phrase like ‘Accounts receivable automation software’ than you do for ‘Accounting software’. Remember, if your keywords are too obscure, you risk losing your spot on a SERP.
LSI or latent semantic indexing keywords may also be  useful. LSI is a tool used by Google to understand synonyms and can contextualize keywords by linking them with relevant ones. This means that a synonym does not necessarily have to be an LSI keyword, and can be anything relevant in the context of your content. For instance, Googling ‘demand generation’ would have related searches for strategies and comparisons with lead generations. LSI has helped Google in identifying and contextualizing content on web pages better, which is a win when it comes to SEO.

Crawlability and Indexing CSFs
It is essential to know what affects your crawlability. The first is your site and internal link structure. It is imperative to make your search engine’s job of locating your site as easy as possible. For this, you must ensure that your site structure has an appealing UI and makes navigating across different pages intuitive. This way,  crawlers will not find it difficult to get by. For the crawlers to do a comprehensive search on your website, ensure that a fair amount of internal link resources are prevalent for the crawlers to fully cover your website. It is also important to block crawlers’ access to irrelevant pages to avoid saturating the context of your content.
Besides your site and internal structure, making sure that other interferences such as slow site loading speeds are resolved as they add to the crawlability of your website. If you are unsure about your site’s visibility on a SERP, using tools like Google Search Console will help monitor your site’s presence on Google SERP.

Other Important CSFs

Recalling the mechanics of Google’s PageRank algorithm, you will know that your web pages’ networking with other pages is of paramount importance. Having external links from other sites that link to your site — especially higher quality links that come from important sites — along with understanding your competitors’ backlinks and utilizing them will help improve your ranking.
Rich results is a feature that showcases information that is not only important in giving a brief description to a user but also helps crawlers identify your site and the purpose of the content because of its metadata. Rich results have a title, meta description, favicon — and depending on what the page is about it could even show pricing, specifications, and a rating. All of which aid in the crawlability and a user’s understanding of the web page.
Another simple but effective factor is the quality of the content on your page. The use of unique, engaging, and informational content with ample visual representations in the form of high-quality images and video. Google prefers sites with content, and good content at that. The better the quality of the content is, the more favorable you become in Google’s algorithm.
With these factors in place, you’re one step ahead in your SEO journey. When it comes to SEO, being consistent, putting out new content, and following good practices will be sure to help out in the long run. Just remember that SEO is always changing, and if you want to take the bull by the horns — keep updating your methods, and stay ahead of the status quo.

Here's a handy beginner's guide on the basics of A/B testing that covers what A/B testing is, why it's important, how to perform a robust test, and more! This should be a great introduction for those looking to dive into the world of optimisation.

‍What Is A/B Testing? 

A/B testing is a strategy that, simply put, allows you to compare two versions of something and find out which version performs better. 

Marketers use this technique to compare two or more versions of their websites, adverts, emails, pop-ups, or landing pages against each other to see which version is most effective. In A/B testing, A refers to ‘control’ or the original version and B refers to ‘variation’ or the new version. A/B tests can provide both qualitative and quantitative insights for the marketer. It usually falls under the larger umbrella of Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO.

To illustrate an example, you might test two different Google Ads to see which one drives more purchases or you might want to test two versions of a CTA button on a webpage to see which version leads to more webinar sign-ups. The version that drives more visitors to take the desired action (click on the ad, sign up for the webinar, etc) is the winner.

Why Does it Matter?

A/B testing is a great way to field-test ideas before finalising implementation. A/B testing helps you track impact of the changes on key metrics like conversion rates, drop off rates, etc. Thereby providing key insights on how effective the changes are going to be. Secondly, leaders don’t want to make decisions unless there is strong evidence for them, particularly when they have to incur costs. A/B testing helps databack ideas and decide where and how to invest the marketing budget. It is a great tool for creating effective marketing strategies. 

Where do marketers use A/B testing?

Almost any style or content element that is a customer-facing item can be evaluated using A/B testing. 

Some common examples include:

• Website design and layout
• Email campaigns and personalised emails
• Social media marketing strategies
• Paid Adverts
• Newsletters
  

In each category, A/B tests can be conducted on multiple elements. For example, if you want to test your website design, you can test the colour scheme, layout, headings and subheadings, pricing page, special offers, CTA button designs, etc, amongst many other elements.

While the metrics for conversion are unique to each website, A/B tests can be used to collect data and understand user behaviour, user actions, the pain points, reception to new features, satisfaction with existing features, etc. The metrics however depend on the industry and type. For example, the metrics for B2B (new leads or deals won) will be different from their B2C and D2C counterparts (cart abandonment rate, total purchases, etc). 

The Primary Types of A/B tests:

1. Split URL testing:

The simplest in concept — in split URL testing, two versions of a webpage url are compared with each other using webpage traffic to see which performs better on key metrics. It is the primary testing method for most organisations vying for website optimisation. However, this is not the best method to compare between two changes. It is mostly used to compare the original version with the new version that has some changes. More importantly, you can’t learn more about how different changes or elements interact with each or what combinations perform best.

2. Multivariate testing (MVT):

Multivariate testing allows the experimenter to compare multiple variables in the same test. This helps further what split URLs can do by overcoming their main limitation. Here, you can compare various combinations of the elements whose impact you’re trying to test. Good multivariate tests can combine all possible permutations to find which combination produces the best results. However, a large traffic is needed to be able to divide the traffic to face all the permutations of the webpage that is created by the traffic.

3. Multi-page testing:

Multi-page, as the name suggests, implements the changes being studied over multiple pages instead of a single page as is seen with simple split A/B tests. This helps understand how the changes impact the visitors in terms of how they interact with the different pages that they encounter on the website. This also helps maintain consistency when a visitor is met with a new variation that is being tested. 

How to perform an A/B test

The A/B testing process can be summarised as follows...

1. Data Collection:

In the first stage, the marketers or experimenters collect data from their analytics softwares to look out for numbers like high and low traffic areas, pages with high and low conversion rates, and or drop-off rates. This helps understand how the webpage is currently performing.

2. Decide what features you want to test:

Here marketers decide what features on the website or webpage they want to track and identify the goals. In other words, the determining the key conversion metrics that they want to improve for those features.

3. Formulate hypothesis:

Here, one starts generating A/B testing ideas and formulating a hypothesis for why the changes will perform better in terms of impact on the metrics being tracked.

4. Create variations:

After the hypothesis has been created, giving direction and clarity to the marketer’s goals, create variations that will be tested against the current version. This is where the marketer will choose the method of testing as well as the A/B tool used for testing. 

5. Run test:

After everything is in place, the only thing left to do is to run the test. Most A/B testers suggest around two weeks of testing on average. However, it varies based on the campaign, industry and traffic. 

6. Analyse results:

Once the test is complete, the experimenter can interpret the results given by the A/B test. It is important to ensure that the result is statistically significant. In other words, if one version saw better results than the other version, the changes can be confidently attributed to the new changes (and not coincidences).

7. Make changes:

Finally, now that the marketer has data backing their new ideas or proposed changes, they can go ahead and implement them to reap the reward of a more effective variation on metrics such as conversion rates, drop off rates, click-through rates and so on.

How do A/B testing tools work?

In short, every A/B testing tool has a piece of code that decides which variation of the webpage, email or ad each visitor sees. It also collects the data for the visitors of each variation which helps you compare and analyse visitor behaviour. 

This code works by incorporating the URL of the page(s) that are being tested. It also incorporates the metrics that you want to test. The results from this will determine which variation performs better. The tool’s cookies track visitors and opt them into the experiment. It will divert the traffic where half the visitors see version A (the control) and half see version B (the variant). The cookies track which version a particular visitor is opted into and measures their actions on the webpage towards the specified goal. 

There are several tools on the market today for A/B testing including Hubspot’s A/B testing tool, Google Optimize, VWO, and Optimizely.

Attribution modeling is a key approach to measuring marketing performance, especially in the complex, long sales cycles typical of B2B contexts. It provides a framework for assigning credit to various interactions throughout the customer journey, helping businesses identify which touchpoints contribute most to conversions. While no attribution model is perfect, each offers different levels of usefulness depending on the context. In B2B marketing, where customer interactions are numerous and extended over time, the right attribution model offers invaluable insights into which channels drive sign-ups and what content influences conversions, allowing businesses to better understand and optimize their marketing strategies.

TL;DR

Attribution modeling evaluates how different marketing touchpoints contribute to conversions. In B2B with long sales cycles, this can be complex, and while all models have limitations, they offer valuable insights. Single-touch models like First-Touch and Last-Touch give full credit to one interaction, while Multi-Touch models distribute credit across multiple touchpoints. Time-Decay models emphasize recent interactions and Influence Attribution credits, all touchpoints that impacted the deal. Choose a model based on your sales cycle, business needs, and desired insights.

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What are attribution models?

Attribution models are frameworks that help analyze the customer journey and assign credit to the various touchpoints prior to the conversion. The method for assigning the credit is different for each attribution model depending on either the position of the touchpoint in the customer journey or a data-driven estimation of the significance of that touchpoint. 

Additionally, businesses may need to configure these attribution models to suit their unique circumstances - such as considering an attribution window of, say, 60 days or 365 days depending on their sales cycle or performing the attribution analysis at a contact or opportunity, or account level depending on their sales motion.

With the help of these models, marketers are able to identify channels and tactics that drive more conversions and revenue, driving higher ROI for the business.

The following are some of the main reasons why attribution modeling is important. 

• They provide insight into channels and campaigns that drive conversions and revenue
• They help plan and distribute spending to the right marketing channels
• Also, they help us identify the most influential channels and campaigns for each stage of the marketing and sales funnel.

There are different types of attribution model available for marketers, and we will dive into each in the coming sections.

Categories of Attribution Models

Before delving into how some of the most popular attribution models work, it’s worth understanding the mechanics of attribution modeling. A general categorization of attribution models would include two types. They are - 

1. Rule-based attribution models
2. Data-driven attribution models.

1. ‍Rule-based attribution models

These models use predetermined rules for assigning attribution credits to touchpoints. These pre-defined rules determine the weightage or credit for a touchpoint primarily based on its position in the customer journey. Hence, these models are also called Position based Attribution Models. 

In addition to the position, you can also define custom logic to assign differential weights based on the seniority of the customer representative involved in the touchpoint (say Director and above gets higher weight) as well as the amount of effort expended by the buyer in that interaction (attending a webinar required higher effort from a buyer than clicking on a paid search ad). 

2. Data-driven attribution models

These models assign attribution credits to touchpoints based on an algorithmic estimation of the significance of that touchpoint in converting the customer. Some of the popular algorithmic techniques are Markov Chain models and Shapely value-based models. Whilst data-driven attribution is seen as the north star of Multi-Touch Attribution, they are also more expensive to compute, require a large volume of conversions and touchpoints not to be biased, and are harder to debug. 

Whilst each approach has its own pros and cons, a combination of these models may be leveraged to identify marketing leakage and improve ROI.

What are the different types of attribution models?

Single-Touch attribution models

Single-touch attribution models are among the most straightforward approaches used to evaluate marketing performance. These models focus on one touchpoint in the customer journey and assign all credit for the conversion to that one. While straightforward, these models might only sometimes provide a complete picture, especially in scenarios involving complex sales cycles.

Some of the most common types of single-touch attribution models include:

1. First-Touch Attribution

‍The first-touch attribution model assigns full credit to the initial interaction that brought the customer into the marketing funnel. This model is particularly useful for businesses with simple, transactional sales processes, such as SaaS sign-ups. By understanding which initial touchpoints are most effective at attracting prospects, marketers can better focus their efforts on top-of-the-funnel activities.

However, the limitation of first-touch attribution becomes apparent in longer sales cycles. For example, if a potential customer interacts with a brand through a blog post, attends a webinar, and finally makes a purchase, first-touch attribution would credit only the initial blog post. This approach overlooks the influence of subsequent interactions that may have been crucial in nurturing the prospect through the funnel.

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2. Last-Touch Attribution

Conversely, the last-touch attribution model gives full credit to the final interaction before the conversion occurs. This model is beneficial when trying to identify what specifically triggered the conversion. For instance, if you want to determine whether a blog post, a LinkedIn ad, or a webinar was the last factor that led a prospect to book a meeting, last-touch attribution can provide clarity.

While last-touch attribution can offer valuable insights into what ultimately led to a conversion, it has drawbacks. This model can skew results by ignoring the role of earlier touchpoints. For example, in a long B2B sales cycle, if a prospect finally signs a contract after several months of interaction, attributing the entire credit to the final step—such as a contract-signing tool like DocuSign—may not accurately reflect the contributions of earlier interactions. This can lead to an incomplete understanding of the marketing efforts that influenced the final decision.

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3. Last Non-Direct Touch Attribution:

This model assigns 100% attribution credit to the last non-direct touchpoint. A non-direct touchpoint is an interaction that is guided by a specific source the business sets up (like an ad, email campaign, newsletter, etc.). 

When your website traffic doesn’t come from a known source, they are considered direct traffic (traffic that came from prospects directly entering the company URL into the browser, for example). 

Let’s assume that a lead interacted with your brand 5 times, each touchpoint is as given below.

• Touchpoint 1 - Prospect clicks on a PPC ad
• Touchpoint 2 -  Prospect arrives at your site’s landing page
• Touchpoint 3 - Prospect subscribes to your newsletter
• Touchpoint 4 - A week later, your prospect clicks on a newsletter campaign
• Touchpoint 5 - Prospect directly visits the website and initiates a free trial before purchasing a subscription 

Touchpoints 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 constitute all the prospect’s interactions with your brand that led to them purchasing your product. Keep in mind that, in reality, businesses deal with numerous prospects interacting with several touchpoints, making the process of mapping the customer journey far more convoluted.

So if we consider the above-given example, this model would assign 100% sales credit to touchpoint 4 or the newsletter campaign clicked on, as that was the last non-direct source before the sale. This model assumes that every interaction is a consequence of the non-direct campaign, hence making it the most influential.

Is Single-Touch attribution an INEFFECTIVE model?

Many businesses and marketing aficionados are of the opinion that single-touch attribution is not an effective model on its own. It is often considered to be a one-dimensional approach that fails to faithfully represent a customer’s conversion journey down the funnel. 

As we have discussed, while single-touch models may have their own relevant use cases (like for products with shorter sales cycles), it may not be as effective in identifying the most influential touch-point in a B2B customer journey. 

If big data in marketing has proved anything, it's that customer journeys can be non-linear, sophisticated paths spanning several channels and mediums. Assigning 100% of the credit to a single touchpoint will rarely be sufficient.

Multi-Touch Attribution Models

To address the limitations of single-touch models, multi-touch attribution models distribute credit across multiple touchpoints in the customer journey. These models offer a more nuanced view of how various interactions contribute to conversions, making them particularly useful for complex sales processes.

Linear Attribution

The linear attribution model assigns equal credit to every touchpoint the customer interacts with along their journey. This approach highlights the importance of each interaction, providing a balanced view of how various touchpoints contribute to the final conversion. In a B2B context, where a customer may engage with a company through several channels before making a purchase, linear attribution helps ensure that no single interaction is undervalued.

However, linear attribution can also have its drawbacks. By giving equal weight to all touchpoints, this model may overvalue less significant interactions and fail to capture the varying levels of influence each touchpoint has on the conversion. For example, if a customer interacts with a blog post, attends a webinar, and then downloads a white paper before making a purchase, linear attribution would attribute equal credit to each of these touchpoints, potentially overlooking the unique impact of each interaction.

U-Shaped Attribution

The U-shaped attribution model provides more weight to the first interaction and the touchpoint that leads to conversion while giving less credit to intermediate interactions. This model strikes a balance between acknowledging the importance of initial engagement and recognizing the significance of conversion-driving touchpoints. For B2B businesses with longer sales cycles, the U-shaped model can offer valuable insights into which early touchpoints attract prospects and which final touchpoints are crucial in closing the deal.

The U-shaped model is particularly useful when you want to understand the relative importance of initial and final touchpoints. However, it may not fully account for the influence of touchpoints in between, which can also play a crucial role in nurturing the prospect through the sales funnel.

W-Shaped Attribution

The W-shaped attribution model adds more granularity by assigning credit to the first touch, the lead conversion touch, and the final deal-closure touchpoints. This model is designed to provide a comprehensive view of the customer journey, capturing the influence of key stages along the way. In a B2B setting, where a prospect's journey may include various touchpoints such as content downloads, webinars, and sales meetings, the W-shaped model ensures that significant interactions at each stage receive appropriate credit.

While the W-shaped model offers a detailed view of the customer journey, it can also be complex to implement and interpret. The model’s emphasis on multiple key touchpoints may lead to a more detailed understanding of the customer journey but may require more sophisticated tracking and analysis.

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Time-Decay Attribution Model

The time-decay attribution model assigns more credit to touchpoints closer to the conversion event, assuming that later-stage interactions significantly impact the final decision. This model recognizes that earlier interactions are essential but less influential than those closer to the conversion point.

The time-decay model can help identify which touchpoints are most influential in the final stages of the customer journey. For instance, if a lead interacts with various marketing channels over several months, the time-decay model would attribute more credit to the interactions that happen closer to the conversion date while still acknowledging the role of earlier touchpoints.

However, it may undervalue early interactions that played a crucial role in initial engagement. By focusing more on recent touchpoints, this model may not fully capture the cumulative impact of the entire customer journey.

‍4. Linear Attribution

‍A linear attribution model assigns attribution credits evenly among all touchpoints. While this model is far more illustrative than any of our single-touch attribution options, it's a relatively simplistic approach when compared to its nonlinear variants. 

Let’s assume that the total number of touchpoints in our PMS example is four: An advert, a blog, a review, and a retargeting campaign. Linear attribution would reward 25% of attribution credits to each of these touchpoints.

Of course, in reality, the number of touchpoints a B2B customer goes through is significantly higher — so the weights for each one are likely to be far smaller.

5. U-Shaped Attribution

‍The U-shaped model assigns attribution credits to all touchpoints — but assigns higher credits specifically to the first and last touchpoints. This would imply that your customer’s first and last interactions prior to the conversion milestone are the two most valuable touch-points in their journey. 

Consider the same four touch points as with the previous example (Ad, Blog, Review, and Retargeting campaign). This time, maybe 40% of the credits will be assigned to the first and last touch points each. The two touchpoints in-between will receive only 10% each as they are deemed less influential to the conversion decision.

The model laid out in a bar graph takes the shape of the letter ‘U’, hence the name.

6. Time Decay Attribution

‍ Time decay attribution assigns attribution credits in an ascending cascade. 

What this means is that each touchpoint is given progressively higher credit, with the first touchpoint having the least credit and the last touchpoint having the most. This is an effective tool in mapping out a customer’s conversion journey. 

The model works on the assumption that touchpoints closer to the conversion were far more influential than touchpoints further away from the conversion. Again, using our handy four touchpoint PMS example, a time decay model would assign attribution credits in this manner: 5% for the advert, 15% for the blog, 20% for the reviews page, and 60% for the retargeting campaign.

7. W-shaped attribution

This type of attribution model is similar to the U-shaped model we discussed earlier. 

The first and the last touchpoints are also given importance in this model, just as in the U-shaped model. But during the middle of the sales funnel, if you generate quality leads, then that touchpoint is also considered influential. And therefore is given equal importance as that of the first and last touchpoint. 

So, if there are 5 first touchpoints in total, the first, middle, and last touchpoints will be given 30% each and the rest only 5%.

To give you a clear-cut idea, take five touchpoints. For example, an advert, a blog, a case study, reviews, and finally, retargeting campaign. 

A prospect got in touch with your business through an advertisement, prompted to read your blogs, where they decide to subscribe to your business’s newsletter. Thereby generating a lead towards the middle of the process. The lead then continued to follow up on their research by constantly staying in touch with the business through newsletters. And finally, the lead converts by signing up for a free trial. Following is an example of a graphical representation of the W-shaped attribution model for the given example. 

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Influence Attribution

Influence attribution, or custom attribution, is a flexible approach that assigns credit to all touchpoints that have influenced the deal. This model allows marketers to analyze the impact of different channels and interactions on the final conversion, providing a comprehensive view of how various touchpoints contribute to the customer journey.

While influence attribution offers valuable insights into channel impact and the relative effectiveness of different marketing efforts, it carries the risk of double-counting revenue. By assigning credit to all touchpoints involved in the conversion process, this model may attribute more value to each touchpoint than is warranted, potentially leading to inflated performance metrics.

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Choosing the Right Attribution Model

Selecting the right attribution model depends on several factors, including the complexity of your business, the length of your sales cycle, and the specific insights you want to gain. Here are some key considerations to keep in mind:

1. Business Complexity and Sales Cycle Length

Single-touch models may provide sufficient insights for simple, transactional businesses. For more complex B2B sales processes, multi-touch and time-decay models offer a more detailed understanding of how various touchpoints contribute to conversions.

2. Key Insights

Determine what questions you want to answer. Are you interested in understanding what drives initial sign-ups, or do you need to know which touchpoints are most effective in closing deals?

3. Ease of Implementation

Choose a practical and feasible model for your marketing and sales teams to implement. While multi-touch models provide more detailed insights, they may require more sophisticated tracking and analysis.

4. Goals and Metrics

Adapt your attribution model based on whether your goal is to track revenue, measure the effectiveness of touchpoints, or evaluate overall marketing performance.

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Here’s a summary table to help you choose the right attribution model based on your needs:

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Limitations of Attribution Models

Single-touch attribution models (like first-touch, last-touch, and list non-direct touch) are simple to implement but have several disadvantages. They oversimplify the customer journey by assigning credit to a single touchpoint, ignoring the contributions of other touchpoints. Similarly, these models also neglect the aggregate effect of multiple touchpoints over time. What results is inaccurate credit allocation, because the model disregards individual customer behavior and other factors. 

On the other hand, multi-touch attribution models are definitely more complex because they work with complicated algorithms and technology. This often requires expert knowledge and pro- marketing knowledge of marketing software. The impressions from data can be misleading because of shortcomings like wrong assumptions and wrong weightage assigned to each marketing activity. To add on, while multi-touch attribution models are efficient for data- rich digital marketing campaigns, they are not equipped to measure external factors like word-of-mouth, seasonality or pricing.  

Like single touch attribution models, multi-touch attribution models can also miss out on giving the full picture. Linear attribution models assume that all touchpoints have equal influence on customer behavior, which is not always the case. U-shaped, W-shaped and Time-Decay models run the risk of oversimplifying the customer journey since they assign more credit only to some touchpoints, while neglecting others. This could cost the model some valuable insights and paint an incomplete picture. The time-decay attribution model considers the recency of the customers close to the conversion event, but it can still overlook the significance of earlier touchpoints.

Takeaway

Needless to say, all attribution models are not appropriate for all use cases. Different attribution models aid different types of marketing campaigns and can reveal different insights into the customer journey.

In the end, a lot of the use cases for these types of attribution models are subjective. The decision to opt for a specific model can be based on several reasons spanning from the nature of your product to the extent of your brand equity. It may also vary based on the specific kind of insight you want to achieve. 

More often than not, you will find yourself using more than just one model with several stipulations and custom values for each variant. Fortunately, the progressive ingenuity of AI and constant innovations around attribution modeling will render your experience less of a trial by fire and more of an intuitive, insightful practice. 

Leveraging the right marketing analytics platform will be the first step in deciding the attribution model required for your company/business. As we said, it's best to rely on more than one model to improve your desired results. And for that, you will need an expert team, like Factors, that understands your requirements and guides you in leveraging the right techniques. 

With Factors.ai, you can easily track the effectiveness of your campaigns and content, identify which channels are driving the most conversions, and optimize your marketing efforts for maximum results. The tool also offers a user-friendly interface and customizable dashboards, making it easy for you to access and interpret your data.

Interested? Sign up here for a FREE trial, or contact our team to get a Free consultation now. Here is the contact email for your reference - solutions@factors.ai

Bonus FAQs

1. How do I choose the right attribution model for my business?

In order to choose the right attribution model, you will need to know the target market, the target audiences, and so on. And once you have everything set, consider the following.

• Define your business goals. The attribution model you select must align with your business goals. Is it sign-ups? Leads? SQLs? Or just organic traffic.
• Once you have defined the goal, understand the types of attribution models and how each model allocates credits to the touchpoints.
• Evaluate the data you have to get an idea of the current touchpoints where your business is driving conversions [goals].
• Test out different models to see which is more effective.
• And finally, constantly review the results and update the models according to the business needs. 

‍2. How do attribution models help find the gap in the customer journey?

As we discussed earlier in the blog, each attribution model provides insights into your customers' touchpoints with your business. Which itself gives the different paths each customer has taken to reach your service. 

Thereby helping you understand the customer journey and find the touchpoints you missed during your initial marketing campaign.

3. How do attribution models help in improving the conversion rate?

Attribution models help improve the conversion rate by identifying which touchpoints in the customer journey are most effective in driving conversions. 

They enable data-driven decisions helping businesses optimize their marketing budget and allocate resources efficiently to boost conversion rates.  

As an organization, in any industry, it's important to understand the audience behavior on websites and what gets them to convert or drop-off. These insights help optimize website content and improve its overall effectiveness.

The D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) industry is no exception. With tens of thousands of visitors logging sessions each day, knowing what exactly they do on the website, what pages they visit and what influences them to convert is crucial. But how do you go about doing this?

Let’s dive into the kinds of analyses that can be performed to truly understand the user journey on a D2C website.

Page Funnels:

For this, let’s consider a common buying process seen on D2C websites:

1. Select the items to purchase
2. Visit ‘Cart’ to review items and proceed to ‘Checkout’
3. Complete payment on the ‘Checkout’ page
4. On successful payment, the order is placed
   

While this seems to be a fairly straightforward process, there is a lot that goes on behind it. Here are the questions that you need to ask:

• What pages do users visit before they reach the checkout page?
• How much time does it take for users to place their order after reaching the checkout page?
• What pages do users visit before they place their order?
• What pages accelerate the buying process?
• What pages do users visit based on the marketing campaign they came from?
  

The answers to these questions will help you understand the success and failure paths on your website. For example, you might see a huge percentage of users visiting the ‘Reviews’ section right before checkout indicating the need for validation. Hence you must highlight the ‘Reviews’ section clearly.

Another insight would be users from, let’s say, an Instagram campaign tend to follow a particular path before placing an order. This can then be used to tweak ad communication and landing pages for the campaign to improve CTRs and possibly conversion rates.

Measurement of Experiments:

Experiments are a key part of any marketing activity whether it’s changing website banners, re-positioning items, highlighting content, or simply changing colors.

However without a measurement framework, you will never know the true impact of an experiment. Performing such analyses is necessary to measure the outcome of an experiment.

Let’s say you have recently changed the home page banner and re-positioned a page link from the footer to the top. The questions that you should be asking here are:

• What has been the impact on the conversion funnel after changing the banner?
• Are users spending more time on the website after re-positioning the page link?
• Is the re-positioned page link playing a crucial role in the conversion funnel? And so on.
  

This will help you know what experiments should be scaled and the ones that should be halted.

User Attributes and Behaviors:

Understanding how different types of users behave on the website helps personalize content and optimize marketing campaigns.

For example, you observe that new website visitors from Mumbai tend to spend more time on one of your blog pages than any other. Or, visitors who use an iPhone have a 30% higher funnel entry rate than other visitors using other devices. As an actionable, you would promote the blog in campaigns running in Mumbai and increase bids/budgets when a user using an iPhone is searching for your product.

Similarly, uncovering other such insights can go a long way towards amplifying your marketing ROI.

Multi-Touch Attribution:

Knowing how different marketing touchpoints play a role in a user journey is crucial especially when it's time to scale marketing campaigns.

The questions that you should ask here are:

• How do I know if my Facebook/YouTube/Google campaigns are working?
• How do different keywords affect the conversion funnel?
• Is everything being attributed to ‘Brand’ campaigns? If yes, how do I know the influence of other campaigns?
• What would the scenario look like if I were to change the attribution model (for example from last touch to linear touch)
  

The answers to these questions will help you understand the impact of marketing touchpoints and their cost effectiveness.

Asking yourself the right questions and being equipped with the right tools will help you uncover hidden insights with the data you always had.
Factors.AI helps you get critical insights into marketing activities and decoding customer behaviors.

What are Lead Magnets?

Lead Magnets are ‘gated’ content pieces that are created with the aim of providing useful information to users in exchange for their contact details (Email IDs/Mobile Nos). Content pieces such as newsletters, guides, white papers and other informational documents are used for this purpose.

The captured leads are then nurtured through customized email sequences in order to improve funnel progression and conversion rates.

Here’s a classic example of a lead magnet:

Let’s say you’re browsing a business website that provides sales intelligence to other companies. Just as you reach the middle of the page, you see a link to an insightful and informational guide. To access it, you click on the Call-To-Action button ‘Download Now’, which then triggers a popup asking for your email ID. Upon successfully entering the ID, you’d have access to the guide while the marketing team at the other end would add your ID to a mailing list for the purpose of nurturing.

Why Don’t We Give All Content For Free?

To answer this question, let’s analyze the pros and cons of not having any gated content on the website:

1. Pros:
   

- High Accessibility: With no form in place, users will be able to access content without filling any form, thus reducing drop-offs

- Helps with SEO: If you’re not gating content, it means it lies in its full form on the website. This helps improve SEO score through strategic keyword placement within the content.

- Better Content Tracking: Since the content is not gated, metrics such as session time duration, page time, bounce rate and so on can be calculated to gauge the effectiveness of the content

2. Cons:
   

- No Leads Acquired: The contact details of the user reading the content will not be known. Thus, the nurturing process cannot take place.

- Losing out to competitors: It is highly likely some other competitors will be using gated content with structured nurturing sequences and could end up winning a customer even though their content may not have had a similar impact.

Thus, while the accessibility and visibility of your brand increases with ungated content, you lose out on leads which other competitors may be able to capture. 

Mixed Gating Strategy - Intent Driven

A mixed gating strategy involves using both gated and ungated policies based on the type of content.

When your focus is on improving the top funnel such as website visits, content that indicates low intent can be ungated. For example, a document on ‘What is Marketing Analytics?’ would be considered low intent since the vast majority of the users would be in the exploration phase and not ready for a sales call yet . This helps in avoiding the generation of leads with low quality who are not in the buying process yet thus allowing Sales Reps. to focus on high quality leads.

When you’re focusing on generating high intent leads, gated content can be utilized. For example, a guide on ROI analysis . Since such content indicates high intent, you can expect the lead volume to be low and the quality to be high.

A good way to connect the two gating policies would be re-marketing campaigns. All users who have visited the ungated content can be re-targeted with promotions for high intent gated content. Leads generated from these campaigns can be then expected to have higher quality in terms of conversion rates.

Account Level Tracking - Isn’t It Sufficient?

Many businesses that have adopted account-based marketing would argue that a mere visit to the website on any of the content pages would be enough to create a user profile with details such as location, company of the user, etc via IP address identification tools. This would seem to solve the gated/ungated content conundrum.

However, there are two points to be considered here. One, most IP address tools are not 100% accurate leading to missing or sometimes even wrong data. Two, even if you have been able to correctly identify the user’s location and company, how would you go about contacting them? It could be a marketing specialist belonging to a large corporation with 10K+ employees or a software engineer of a mid-sized company. Either way, with no email address, there would be no way to determine who read your content.

Thus, account level tracking gives limited understanding of who is reading your content, but is not enough to get contact information that can be used for customized nurturing sequences. 

Finally, it’s important to focus on the content quality and the value it adds to the readers. There should be a strong enough reason for a user to submit their Email ID in exchange for the content. Good quality content will leave a lasting impression on the reader and aid towards brand recall.

Webinars are a great way to communicate with business prospects. They empower you to demonstrate value to hundreds of people whilst sitting in the most remote parts of the world. They enable you to deliver memorable presentations from all across the globe without leaving your desk.

But how should you go about hosting a webinar that, in addition to adding value to your audience, converts them into paying customers?

Let’s go step-by-step and list the key stages of planning a successful webinar:

1. Topic and Audiences:

The very first step towards executing a successful webinar is to identify a topic — and the right target audience for it. Pick a topic that adds value to your target market and makes attendance worth their time. Perform extensive market research to truly understand the challenges and interests of your audience. Needless to say, you should only choose a topic you and your company are proficient in. In the case of Factors.ai, for example, this might be presentations related to marketing analytics, multi-touch attribution, etc.

2. Communication and Promotion Channels:

Once you’ve set your topic and identified your target audience, it’s important to make a concise communication plan for the same. This would involve shortlisting  channels to be activated for promotions, content buckets/themes, and a timeline of when you plan to engage the audiences. Here’s an example:
Channels: Social Media (FB, LinkedIn), Google Ads, Email, Slack Communities, etc
Content Theme: Brand of Speaker, Virtual Summit, Value proposition, etc
Timeline: Ads to be run from N-30 till the webinar date, Customized Email sequences to be sent to website subscribers on N-20, N-10, N-7 and so on.

Key metrics for measuring performance will depend on the type of channel. For instance, in the case of Social Media, link clicks and CTRs will be good metrics. For emails, metrics like open rates and click through rates may be better suited.

3. Pricing and Offers:

If you plan to monetize your webinar, a pricing model that changes based on the promotion channels may be employed (the reason being user intent).

For example, while promoting a business webinar, a user browsing Facebook (lower intent) may need more convincing than a user browsing LinkedIn (higher intent), given the latter is a business platform. This is where price fluctuation will  convert even low intent users into webinar registrants. You may look to promote the entry fee for the webinar on Facebook at 10-12$ while promoting the same on LinkedIn at 18-20$.

Another variation that may be added to the webinar are offers. If you have a product/service that would be promoted before/during the course of the webinar, create a custom offer just for webinar promotions. This way, you will also be able to better measure the performance of the webinar

For email sequences to already subscribed users, specific offers (based on their profiles and funnel stage) can be created to improve attendance and pipeline velocity.

4. Creatives and Targeting:

The quality of your creative copies and designs will make or break the performance of your online promotions. The best way to approach this is to create a custom copy and design for each set of audiences to increase viewer connect. If this proves to be resource-heavy, you could experiment with 2-3 creative variations to see what works best.

Always take note of these learnings and implement the best practices for future webinars. It’s generally best practice to highlight the webinar takeaways as well as details about date and venue.

5. Landing Page or Lead Generation Form?

It's now time to decide how and where a user will be able express interest for your webinar. There are two ways to go about this:

A) Lead Generation Ads

These simple in-line forms open instantly when an ad is clicked without taking users to a separate page. Users can fill in the required fields and move on.

‍Pros:
i) Quick and easy
ii) Does not require website development, making execution faster

‍Cons:
i) Very little content can be put into these forms to educate users about the webinar
ii) Website cookies will not be generated making re-marketing campaigns less effective
iii) Integration for payment getaways (in case of a paid webinar) will prove to be a difficult task

‍B) Landing Pages

Creating short and crisp landing pages with concise content is a great way to get users to register for the webinar.

‍Pros:
i) More content can be accommodated to tell a story and convince users
ii) Integration with payment gateways is seamless
iii) Re-marketing campaigns are simple to execute through cookies for users who have visited the page but are yet to register
‍Cons:
i) Resource-heavy since it involves website development thus increasing overall execution time and cost

So, depending on the resources and time available to you, either one can be chosen.

6. Practice Run and Hosting the Webinar

No matter how well you promote your webinar, if on the day things don’t go as planned, you may end up losing all your potential prospects.

Therefore, practise the entire webinar flow and everything you plan to cover on the day. Make sure your content is validated from other team members to ensure accuracy and relevance. Finally, ensure your webinar is interactive as you do not want to lose out on participants mid-way.

7. Reaching Out To Webinar Participants

Do you plan on reaching out to each participant after completion of the webinar to check whether they’ll be interested in your offerings?

While it’s not a bad idea to do this, a poor execution strategy could leave a bad impression on your brand. It always helps to be subtle and strategic.

‍Here’s how:

• Create a checkbox in the webinar registration form asking users whether they’ll be open to calls from the Sales team to know more about your offerings. This way, you’ll know who are the ones interested to know more beforehand.

• During the webinar, take up questions from participants to understand challenges they face in their business'. Use this moment to talk about the specific features that your product/service solves for these challenges and ask the participants to directly reach out to you via mail for documents like case-studies or feature specifications. The Sales team can then take the discussion forward and drive the funnel.

• After the webinar, share an event replay that can be consumed by participants who couldn’t attend the webinar and by those who would prefer to go through the content at their own pace for insights. Add a Call-To-Action here asking if they would open to be contacted by the Sales Team.

• When contacting participants, begin every conversation with takeaways of the webinar and how useful it has been for them rather than directly asking for a demo. This would help structure the conversation around the challenges faced by the participant and how your product/service could solve it.

• It is important to understand where a webinar participant is in the buying funnel. For example, if someone is simply exploring products/services, first understand their problems and use-cases, suggest ways they can solve them, and then proceed to the next stage of engagement. This would ensure you’re not too early or too late with your sales pitch.

8. Reporting and Analytics

Finally, how do you plan to measure the success of the webinar? Are you measuring the right metrics and tracking impact on the pipeline? This data is critical to understanding how much the webinar has resonated with the prospects and what needs to be tweaked to make future webinars a success.

Most teams would be measuring performance across different data silos such as Facebook Ads, Google Analytics and an MAP/CRM such as Hubspot/Salesforce.

Let’s a take real-life scenario to understand this better:

Jay, a marketing manager, has recently concluded an important webinar for his organization that develops SaaS products. He now wants to:

• Understand the impact of the efforts that were put in to set up and promote the webinar.
• Understand how the webinar participants progress through the buying funnel to focus future promotion efforts on channels that produce quality prospects

Jay’s team would be able to give a performance report on:

• Ad Platforms such as LinkedIn Ads in terms of which ads worked best, got the highest clicks, CTR and other metrics.
• Landing page visits and drop-offs across channels
• Hubspot contacts and Salesforce leads created from the webinar

While Jay will be able to gather insights on individual platforms for the webinar, more importantly, he will need a complete view into user journeys right from the first user visit all the way up to their status in the buying funnel.

This would help Jay make informed decisions for planning future webinar promotions better in order to acquire quality prospects.

At this point, Jay’s team were unable to find a way to stitch these data silos together to give Jay what he wanted.

Human beings are social animals. Over thousands of years, we’ve developed gestures, languages, and tools to express ourselves to those around us. Our exceptional ability for communication has empowered us to exchange ideas like no other species on the planet. Given that this dialogue is at the heart of the human experience, it’s of little surprise that Conversational ABM is becoming an increasingly effective engagement technique for the modern-day marketer.

TL;DR:

• Conversational ABM is a marketing strategy that uses chatbots or live chats to actively engage with target accounts.
• It is crucial to identify and segment your prospects since the demography of each prospect could vary.
• Set proper boundaries when assigning SDRs and ensure that the visitors are routed to appropriate SDRs. 
• Ensure you’re running personalized ads to each prospect and provide relevant and consistent messaging throughout. 
• One of the best platforms to converse with your prospects is LinkedIn.
• Be ready for your prospect at any time by using AI-powered chatbots.

What is conversational ABM?

Conversational ABM is a marketing strategy that uses chatbots or live chat to engage actively with target accounts. 

With real-time conversations, businesses can build strong relationships with their target audience and address specific needs. In addition, it creates a more human connection with prospects, leading to a higher likelihood of closing a deal. 

And because 90% of prospects identify live messaging as their most favored channel of business communication, conversational ABM is a strategy worth considering.  

How to implement a Conversational ABM strategy?

1. Identify your target accounts

As is the case with any ABM strategy, your first step should be to align marketing and sales through a collaborative identification of accounts. 

The target list is usually determined by a few specific firmographic characteristics such as industry, revenue, and geography. Once generated, this list will dictate the tone and language of your messaging, content, and campaigns. So getting it right is pretty important. 

2. Identifying and segmenting prospects

Once you’ve created a fresh list of target accounts, the next step is to identify individual users at these target accounts to reach out to within this list. Maybe you want to target CXOs, or maybe managers, or maybe engineers, or maybe a combination of a variety of such roles.

Regardless, the optimal approach for each demographic will undoubtedly vary. Hence, it would make sense to segment this list of prospects further by customer life cycle, sales stage, pain points, and, most importantly, intent. Then the person in charge allocates this segmented list among Sales Development Representatives, who can work out distinct marketing strategies for their targets.

3. Building boundaries

In an ABM approach, it is important to assign individual Sales Development Representatives to build a strong relationship with each prospect. 

When assigning SDRs, always keep in mind to set strict ownership boundaries. It helps route the visitors to appropriate SDRs and eliminate any engagement overlaps. 

4. Personalizing ads

Okay, now you know whom you’re contacting and why. Now it’s time to think about the approach for each prospect. This stage involves an intricate balancing act between personalization and scale. 

Of course, every individual in every role across every company you’re targeting has their own unique preferences — but personalizing ads at that level isn’t feasible. Instead, customizing ads on a higher level — say, by role or industry, is the way to go. This entails running campaigns based on prospect-specific pain points, and value adds. 

A CMO may care about marketing’s influence on revenue, while a marketing manager may be interested in improving workflow and automation. Your campaigns should resonate appropriately with all such use cases.

5. Sentry Surveillance

Your target list is ready, and your personalized ads are running. Now, the second a prospect from your list is on your website, your marketing + sales teams need to be conversation-ready. 

The first step here is to make sure everyone has access to all the information they’ll need. It means all your CRM data, marketing automation data, and intent data should be consolidated, organized, and easily accessible. Once equipped with all relevant information about the visitor and their company, your SDR team is all set to engage with the prospect.

6. Complete consistency

Personalization is the most important aspect of conversational ABM when a prospect is currently on your website. 

Assuming your prospects love your ads and visit your website, they should be landing on a homepage that’s relevant to them. Any decent content management system (CMS) will be able to identify a contact when they land on your homepage and cater to the web flow in a manner that ensures a personalized experience. 

7. Chit-Chat

A relevant landing page will definitely help direct prospects toward your product. But a lot of the time, this won’t be sufficient. 

A target will stay on your website only for a few precious minutes, and it’s important to make the most of it. Sure, you could wait until they make their way to the demo form and submit their details — but Conversational ABM encourages marketers and SDRs to proactively reach out through a relevant live-chat message. 

References to the contact’s role, the company’s signals, or a prominent pain point are all great ways to get the conversation going. This is the meat and potatoes of the Conversational ABM process. SDRs utilize target data to provide a genuine, relevant, and personal dialogue with their prospects to confirm a demo and push accounts through the funnel

8. Conversational ABM - Around the clock

Conversational ABM involves interacting and connecting with prospects around the clock. While thorough research and proactive interactions are valuable tactics, you may want to employ AI-powered bots to render the process air-tight. So when you do happen to get that one inbound demo at 4 in the morning, you can trust that your chatbots will be up to schedule that demo for you. 

Oh, and another thing — conversational ABM doesn’t top conversations on your website. Linkedin is your friend when it comes to interacting with your target’s content posts. Feel free to leave likes, comments, and, if appropriate, connection requests with prospects. 

Conclusion

And there we have it. When executed well, conversational ABM can be a valuable strategy to bolster your marketing efforts and improve conversions. Though it’s definitely a lot more effort than traditional marketing techniques, conversational ABM pays its dividends in the long run. Prospects form stronger associations with the product and are almost certainly more likely to convert from a distant target to a tight-knit customer.

Factors.ai enables easy integration with CRM platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce. This  can help you generate a more effective ABM campaign. Signup for free or book a demo to start your Conversational ABM campaign today. 

To make the B2B terms glossary easier to read and follow, we have decided these b2b terms into four broad categories:

Such categories include:

1. Measurement and Analytics
2. Content and Lead Generation
3. Strategy and Planning
4. Sales and Customer relationships

I. Measurement and Analytics:

1. A/B Testing

A/B testing or split-testing is a way to improve engagement and conversion rates, by experimenting using 2 variants of an element with 2 separate audiences to measure & compare the user response to each. For example - testing two versions of a webpage or email and choosing the one that leads to more conversions. A/B testing is more about comparative analysis of the two set groups, providing an insight as to which variant works more effectively than the other.

2. Analytics 

Analytics is the process of finding patterns and sequences and extracting relevant information from data sets. It is used  by companies and softwares to analyze user engagement, marketing effectiveness and engagement rates. Analytics help a company or a user in measuring marketing insights, evaluate trends and judge the effectiveness and engagement rates of their platform. Various analytical tools help the companies in designing the product and put together effective marketing strategies.  

3. Application Programming Interface (API) 

APIs are a series of defined rules that streamline communication between different applications. In layman’s terms, APIs are essentially clearly defined methods of communication between various software components.  APIs act as an intermediary layer that facilitate data transfers between systems and softwares giving the company a more detailed  understanding over the functionality of their softwares, traffic and data inputs.

4. Big Data 

Huge amounts of structured and unstructured data which can be analyzed by various tools and traditional methods for the likes of scraping and visualization etc. Put simply, it is a chunk of a variety of different data compiled into one which needs to be differentiated, segmented and analyzed individually to gain some insight. Big data helps in lead generation, designing marketing models and predicting customer behavior. 

5. Bounce Rate 

It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave (“bounce”) rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site. If the bounce rate is extremely high for a landing page, it probably means that the design and call-to-action of the page are not consistent or, it could simply mean that the website content is not relevant and particularly useful for the visitor. Companies design their websites in such a way in order to minimize this bounce rate and generate more inbound leads through SEO, marketing techniques and paid advertisements.

6. Buyer’s Journey 

(synonymous with adoption process)  It can be understood as a complete path taken by a customer right from the first click on the website to the point of being onboarded or buying the said software. It traces the journey right from the inquiry phase to the decision stage. However, it should also be noted the buyer’s journey may also begin from a channel other than the website, say a pop-up ad or direct call or emails sent out by the company.  

7. Click Through Rate (CTR) 

The percentage of people that view an ad and that click on it. A useful metric for measuring the effectiveness of a call-to-action or a pay-per-click ad i.e., paid advertising  A high CTR is not the only indicator of a good paid ad. Similarly if the CTR is high does not necessarily mean that the ad is great. A host of different factors come into play while calculating the relevance and usefulness of the ad.

8. Content Management System (CMS) 

An application that is used to publish, edit, modify, organize, and delete web content in one centralized interface. Common content management systems include WordPress, SquareSpace, and HubSpot. There are also content management systems that are specialized for social media like HootSuite

9. Conversion Path 

The path that website visitors follow to become a lead. It can be understood as one of the many aspects of the potential  “Buyer’s Journey” . It traces out the complete step by step procedure taken by the visitor on the website. Analyzing it gives the company a brief profiling of the visitor and helps the company to know what content of the website is working and what is not. Conversion path is closely measured by the company to track its marketing sales techniques. . 

10. Conversion Rate 

The percentage of website visitors that convert into leads. Here, leads should not be understood as being synonymous with buyers. Leads are visitors who can be potential buyers. Sometimes they may be converted into customers directly and in some cases the company needs to pursue them further  in order to onboard them..

11. Cornerstone Content 

extremely deep content focused on a high-value keyword that is then linked to by other related pieces throughout the site. This is a technique used to rank for competitive keywords.It may highlight a description of your product,  blogs, frequently asked questions and certain keywords.

12. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

 CRM is a system for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers. It includes the marketing techniques, customer policies and sales measures employed by a company in order to rope in new customers and maintain good relations with the existing ones. There are many CRM software systems, two well-known ones are Salesforce and HubSpot.

13. Customer churn

Customer churn rate measures how many customers your business has lost in a given time period. It is an important metric to track both your monthly and annual churn rates and provide knowledge on your customer retention across different dates & time periods. It helps keep track of customers gained and lost over a certain period of time. 

14. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) 

 This is the average amount of money that your customers pay during their engagement with your company. The metric shows average customer worth & provides businesses with an accurate portrayal of their growth potential. It is an important metric for a company to track its costs and the returns it expects on its marketing and selling expenses. Since B2B businesses have a longer sales cycle ranging from days to months, tracking the CLV is important for a company to understand how much it should be spending to gain a customer.

15. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) 

 Shows exactly how much it costs to acquire new customers and how much value they bring to your business. When combined with CLV, this metric helps validate the viability of your business model, measure cost and maintain a healthy profitability margin.

16. Form 

A form should be on every landing page. A form is what turns a website visitor into a lead. A form consists of form fields that the viewer fills out to download the offer. At the very least, a form should have a form field to capture the viewer’s email. The email is the primary identifier of any lead. 

17. Disavow Tool 

In 2012, Google released the disavow tool which allowed website owners to “disavow” spammy backlinks that were pointed to their site thus making website owners responsible for their link profile. A high number of spammy links pointing to your website can hurt your search ranking, and in some cases be a reason for Google to place a penalty on your domain. 

18. Marketing Automation (MA) 

 A process or technique through which marketers handle all their marketing channels (website, blog, social media, email, contacts) in one place. Some of the prominent MAs are HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, and Sharp Spring.

19. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) 

A lead that has shown interest in your business, but you don’t know if they are qualified to buy your services or products yet. However, it must be noted that MQL are those leads who are more likely to become the customer than others. MQLs must be researched or interacted with more to determine whether they can be determined a sales qualified lead and given a call by your sales team.

20. Months to Recover CAC

Also known as the CAC Payback Period — measures the number of months it takes to generate enough revenue to cover the cost of acquiring a customer. In other words, it measures when you break even and a customer starts to generate actual cash for the business. 

21. Pay Per Click (PPC) 

Paid online advertising. It is a marketing model whereby the advertiser pays in proportion to the amount of clicks generated on an online advertisement of their company/software/service. This way of attracting traffic to your site can get pricey and must be done the right way to drive the right kind of traffic to your website.

22. Positioning 

Similar to branding, this term describes how a company positions themselves in their market. Positioning is specifically related to the product (or software) the company aims to sell and the problem it intends to address with its services. On a wider scale it may also include the marketing strategies and customer services offered by the company which help it to stand apart from its competitors. 

23. Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI) 

The revenue generated because of marketing efforts. This is the most important statistic in marketing. 

24. Revenue Churn (MRR churn rate)

 Used to look at the rate at which monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is lost, as a result of lost customers and downgraded subscriptions. To put simply, it implies the loss incurred by the company due to loss of customers and decreased subscriptions.

25. Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)– 

The SERP is the result a user sees when using a search engine. These web pages are ranked based on their keywords and link profiles or they can be listed at the top of the page if they are paid ads. Companies target to be at the top spots of these SERPs in order to gain larger traffic which helps in inbound lead generation and customer profiling through the means of SEO tools, usage of apt keywirds and paid ads

26. Software as a Service (SaaS) 

A kind of software that is subscription-based and centrally hosted, usually on the internet. The most popular kinds of SaaS software are Hubspot, Salesforce, Zoom and Factors.ai.

27. Style Guide 

A set of design parameters that a web designer uses on every page to make sure your website stays consistent.

28. Submission Rate

 On the website page, the percentage of views that resulted in a form submission is called the submission rate. An extremely useful metric for measuring the effectiveness of a landing page as to whether the website has all the relevant content and features to capture the interest of the visitor. If the submission rate is high it means the content posted by the company and its websites are user friendly and capture the interest of the visitor.Most companies operating in B2B and SAAS domain rely on demos and form submissions in order to take a lead forward, as means of converting a website visitor into a prospective customer.

29. Syndicated Content 

When you publish content to your website and someone else likes it so much that they ask if they can duplicate it on their website. This can help deliver your website content like a blog to a wider audience if done correctly or could hurt the rank of your website and the website with duplicate content. 

30. White paper 

A white paper is a sales or marketing document used to persuade potential customers to learn about a particular product or service to get them to make a purchase. A white paper should be “gated“, or put behind a form on a landing page. It is a type of informative and educational  document highlighting various services offered by the company to its customers.

31. White Hat SEO 

SEO that is ethical and refers to any practice that improves your search rankings on a search engine results page (SERP) while maintaining the integrity of your website and staying within the search engines' terms of service. It’s the opposite of black hat SEO and it aims to work in line with the terms and conditions of major search engines like Google.

II. Content and Lead Generation:

32. Campaign 

A way of organizing marketing efforts. Often b2b marketers will use some combination of marketing tools (webinars, ebooks, white papers, press releases, events, keywords, blogs, keywords, social media messages, and buyer personas) for one unified purpose.

33. Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) 

The head of everything marketing at a company.

34. Backlinks

Links from other sites to a website. Backlinks from authoritative websites can increase the search ranking of a website, while non-authoritative websites can hurt a website’s search ranking. For backlinks to help with SEO, they have to be natural and authoritative. For example a backlink from Forbes to Factors.ai would be authoritative and useful for Factors.ai.

35 Branding

 Branding is an integral part of any kind of marketing. A company can create its brand perception through successful customer interactions, company values, products, culture. Good branding makes a company or organization easy to recognize and helps the company be positively perceived by its audience.

36. Call-To-Action (CTA)

 The first step in turning a website visitor into a lead. A call-to-action is an advertisement for a piece of content; this could be a webinar, an ebook, a white paper, or another high-value piece of content. This piece of content is hidden behind a landing page. When a visitor sees a call-to-action and clicks on it, they are taken to the landing page where they are asked to complete a form to access the desired content. The visitor’s information is then stored on a Marketing Automation platform/ Customer Relationship platform and the visitor becomes a lead. 

37. Content 

Comes in various forms like audio, visual and writing(website text, ebook, blog, whitepaper, press release, social media posts), it could be video, static image, or recorded audio like a podcast. Content is at the center of the marketing process.

38. Content Audit 

Content Audit generally consists of mapping out the stages of the buyer’s journey for a given company, then mapping out the company’s existing content to each stage. It is done to ensure that the company’s content is relevant and relatable to the prospective customers and website visitors so that the visitors find content they are looking for and not get stuck in a whirlpool of random information.

39. Content Curation 

The practice of sharing content that was produced by another company. Content curation usually takes place on social media. Content curation is an excellent way for a brand to develop relationships with thought leaders, and show their own thought leadership by association. In some niches, there is already tons of great content out there. In these cases, content curation is a great way to cut through the noise by allying with industry leaders..

40. Content Marketing 

Using content to market products and services. It is usually considered to be a subset of inbound marketing and often functions by educating the buyer about how to solve their problems. Marketers create content that their target market finds helpful and thus create trust and authority. Content should be created for each stage of the buyer’s journey. Blog content should be geared toward the awareness stage, ebooks toward the consideration stage, and content like case studies, whitepapers, and consultations towards the decision stage. 

41. Content Shock

A term coined in 2014 by Mark Schaefer in a blog post. Mark articulates that the amount of online marketing content is increasing exponentially faster than people’s ability to consume it. The supply is growing way faster than the demand, and thus making successful content marketing more and more expensive.

42. Content is king 

A phrase that has truly earned buzzword status. It’s pretty self-explanatory as it just communicates the power of content marketing. Content is more important for the companies operating in the SAAS and B2B sphere since content is the key driver of their sales and marketing endeavors.  

43. Copy 

It refers to the piece of written work by a copywriter or a content creator, about the product or service used for marketing and advertising purposes.

44. Copywriter 

Someone who writes marketing and advertising content. 

45. Direct Mail 

A way of traditional marketing where marketers send marketing content by postal mail. This used to be common practice, but in the digital age, the practice has become less frequent and is often looked down on by marketers.

46. Ebook

 A content piece that can be used to educate your buyers and thus help them to move along the buyer’s journey. Ebooks fit into the awareness and consideration stage of the buyer’s journey and the attract and convert stage of the inbound methodology. An ebook should essentially be “gated” or put behind a form on a landing page for visitors to fill out and download.

47. Email Marketing 

A facet of content marketing. It can be done using inbound methods or outbound methods. Outbound methods of email marketing are invasive and include buying email lists and spamming random people about your products or offers. Inbound methods of using email marketing focus on connecting with and helping people who have already expressed interest in your company. Email marketing fits into the consideration and decision stage of the buyer’s journey and the close stage of the inbound methodology. 

48. External Links 

While internal links link somewhere else on the same website, external links link to another website. If a website has external links that link to authoritative websites, it will help it rank higher in search engines, while a link to an un-authoritative or spammy website will make it rank lower in search engines.

49. Gated Content 

Content that is higher in value and usually for buyers in the consideration or decision stage of the buyer’s journey. This content is placed behind a “gate” or a form on a landing page. The users must fill out the said form or fulfill certain specific requirements of the gate in order for them to access such gated content.  Lots of different kinds of content can be placed behind a form (ebooks, case studies, consultation, whitepaper, webinars, etc.).

50. Guerrilla Marketing 

A strategy to drive publicity, and brand awareness of a product or service by promoting using unconventional methods designed to evoke surprise, wonder or shock.

51. Historical Optimization 

The practice of optimizing past content (blogs, ebooks and other content) to increase its visibility and, as a result, lead generation.

52. Inbound Links 

When another website links to a page on your website. Websites link to other websites when they feature remarkable content. Inbound links give a website more authority and help to drive more relevant traffic to the website.

53. Inbound Marketing 

A term coined by HubSpot founder Brian Halligan. Inbound marketing aims to create a positive experience for the potential buyer by using techniques like website, social media, email, and blogging to attract customers.

54. Influencer 

An influencer or a thought leader is a person that influences a great number of people in an industry. Examples of marketing thought leaders are Seth Godin, Joe Pulluzi, Guy Kawaski, Brian Halligan, and Dharmesh Shah. Nowadays the term influencer has become more pervasive with the advent of social media. Companies also employ such social media influencers in order to drive their advertising. However, they are not as relevant for B2B players since such social media influencers target end consumers not businesses.

55. Integrated Marketing 

A term used to describe when both inbound and outbound (traditional) techniques are used in marketing efforts. To put simply, when the company employs the usage of cold mailing and follow ups on generated leads to onboard new customers, it is called integrated marketing.

56. Internal Links 

While external links to another website, internal links lead to a place on the same website. Internal links help with navigation, user experience and help Google crawl your pages more quickly.

57. Lead 

A person or entity who has given your company their email address and any other information about themselves and expressed interest in your company. Usually, this happens when a person visits a website and fills out a form to download a piece of gated content.

58. Lead Scoring

The process of assigning a score to each contact in your database based on how likely a contact is to close as a customer. Lead scoring is usually done by marketing automation software and it entails adding or subtracting points on several criteria including a contact’s engagement, their persona, their demographic and more.

59. Lead Generation

The task of turning website visitors into leads. There are seemingly infinite ways to generate leads. Everything including your website, social media pages, and content should be generating leads.

60. Lead Nurturing 

The process of moving your leads further down the funnel until they turn into customers. Measures employed by a company to pursue a lead in order to convince such leads into turning clients of the company. Different companies have different means and measures in their respective funnel to nurture the said lead, some employ direct calling, others employ giving a demo session and many such measures. Email marketing is the most common form of lead nurturing.

61. Omni Channel Marketing 

Omni channel marketing refers to marketing that takes place off multiple channels (also called multi-channel marketing). For example, most companies today must have marketing content for mobile devices, computers, ipads and more. The more seamless the experience is across different devices, the better.

62. Outbound Links 

Links from your website to other websites. This can establish your website's authority. However, this could also result in the loss of leads since the website visitor may not come back to your website. Therefore, this is a gamble since it poses a risk of losing prospective customers to other players. One must employ discretion while employing such outbound links in their blogs and websites.

63. Outbound Marketing 

A term used to describe old school marketing techniques like cold calling, email blasts, or television ads. This term is synonymous with “traditional marketing.” Usually, outbound marketing is less tech-savvy than inbound marketing as it is deeply focused on broadcasting yourself to your target audience.

64. Pipeline Marketing 

A term that Bizible claims to have coined. This term addresses the disconnect between lead generation and acquiring customers. Pipeline marketing focuses its efforts on acquiring customers, not just on generating leads as the majority of the leads do not end up converting. According to Bizible “Pipeline marketing is what you’re doing while content marketing, inbound marketing, lead nurturing, and growth hacking is how you do it.”

65 Request for Proposal (RFP) 

Traditionally it has been used as an opportunity to find a marketing agency or consultant with whom you can build an ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship. Most RFPs sent to marketing agencies are pretty standard, asking for facts, figures, management bios, client lists, recent wins and losses, capabilities, strategic approach and case histories.

66. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Internet marketing that promotes websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages. This term is often used synonymously with SEO.

67. Social Media Marketing 

The use of social media for marketing purposes. With well over 1 billion people on social networks today, social media provides a huge opportunity for marketers to gain new leads and prospects. Marketers can use social media to share their marketing content, stay informed on industry trends and news, create business connections, engage with their audience, and find new customers. Social media marketing fits into the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey.

68. Shaped Marketer 

A concept used to describe a marketer that has a breadth of knowledge about a lot of subjects, but also has a depth of knowledge in one or two areas. The concept was first introduced to the spotlight in 2010 by Tim Brown.

69. User Experience 

User experience refers to the experience that someone has on a website. The whole purpose of the website is to give the user a positive experience while helping them align their goals with the goals of the company. User experience includes everything about the look and feel of a website including design, navigation, and even content.

III. Strategy and Planning:

70. Account Based Marketing (ABM) 

Account based marketing is a B2B marketing strategy that focuses on specific targeted accounts which the business want to retain or convert into clients. Here, the business takes a holistic approach of marketing, designing strategies and offerings in order to suit the needs of these particular clients.The benefits of such marketing tools are shorter sales cycles, cost benefit and marketing and sales alignment.Do check out our beginner’s guide to account- based marketing (ABM) for a deep dive into this essential marketing concept.

71. Advocate Marketing 

Advocate marketing is a marketing policy whereby the businesses especially B2B businesses use their existing customers to advocate or market their product. Therefore, this requires less resources since your existing customers become mouthpieces of your company's product. Companies use rewarding mechanisms and loyalty programs to reward such existing customers for their advocacy. 

72. Affiliate Marketing 

Performance-based marketing where a business rewards an affiliate for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's marketing efforts. Common forms of affiliate marketing include PPC and Organic search.

73. B2B Marketing 

Business-to-business marketing refers to marketing policies adopted by a firm to market its products and services to other businesses and organizations. In layman’s terms, it is where a business markets its products and services to other businesses or organizations as opposed to a consumer(B2C marketing). Companies who serve other businesses as their customers rather than individual consumers are called B2B companies.

74. B2C Marketing 

Business-to-consumer marketing that takes place between a business and a consumer. It is where a business markets its products and services to an  individual consumer. For example marketing strategies employed by FMCG players like ITC to market its shampoos.

75. Black Hat SEO

SEO that is focused on outsmarting the search engines instead of working with them. Black hat SEO makes a website appear more authoritative than it is. It includes but is not limited to link schemes, link farms and keyword stuffing. (see White hat SEO).

76. Deliverables 

A term used in project management to describe a tangible or intangible product that is the result of a project.

77. Demand Generation 

A function of marketing that drives interest in a company and creates a demand in the company and its products or services.

78. Keywords 

The words that potential users type into a search bar to find you online. One part of driving traffic to your website is finding out what your buyer personas type into search engines to solve their problem and then create valuable, relevant content around those keywords. This will ensure you rank higher in search engines for that keyword. Search engine Optimzation (SEO) works primarily around specific keywords in order to rank articles and search engine pages.

79. Keyword Stuffing 

A form of black hat SEO that used to be effective where webmasters would take a keyword they wanted to rank for and put it all over the page. But, today keyword stuffing can hurt your search ranking.

80. Landing Page 

When a person clicks on an advertisement or call-to-action, they are taken to a landing page that features the advertised offer. Landing pages usually feature a form that the viewer fills out to obtain the offer.

81. Gamification 

The use of game-like  techniques like competitions, reward generation and other interactive measures to enhance non-game contexts. It's a technique that employs our natural desire to play games. Examples like loyalty programs, daily quizzes, actual games and rewarding schemes can be termed under the module of gamification.

 82. Growth Hacking 

A phrase coined by Sean Ellis in 2010. He describes it as “a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth”. It’s a trendy term that is used to describe a way of integrating marketing and technological savvy to create unmatched growth.

83. Inbound Methodology 

A hybrid term between the buyer’s journey and the sales funnel. It is the process that inbound marketers use to attract strangers to their business and eventually turn those strangers into happy customers that advocate their business to other strangers.

84. Link Schemes 

A link scheme is an unethical way of making your website look more authoritative than it really is to search engines so that it will rank higher in SERPS(Search engine results page).

85. Link Farms 

A link farm is similar to a link scheme where pages are created with the sole purpose of linking to a target website to try and improve that target website’s search ranking.

86. Long Tail Keywords 

A long tail keyword is a keyword phrase made up of multiple words. They are more specific and hence less competitive, which ends up attracting more of the right kind of traffic to your site. An important point to note with such keywords is you have to be precise and particular in drafting such long tail keywords.

87. Newsjacking 

The practice of putting a spin on a breaking news story to gain media attention, gain leads and create revenue.

88. Organic Search 

A free channel for attracting traffic to your website by optimizing it for search engines and using the correct keywords. Organic search will work seamlessly as long as your website has relevant and authoritative content that uses the right keywords.

89. POV 

Short for “point of view”, a POV is a report that a marketing agency gives to a client to help the client assess different marketing channels. For example, a POV would show whether a company’s target audience spent more time on Pinterest, Twitter or Facebook and therefore which social media platform was a better option.

90. Retargeting 

A form of digital advertising that tracks visitors to a site and then shows them ads for that site on other sites.

91. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a website using appropriate keywords in order to rank higher in search requests. The process includes a range of things like creating authoritative content based on the correct keywords for your buyer personas, acquiring inbound links, creating outbound links, gaining social proof, and more.

92. Smart Content 

Website content that changes depending on who is viewing it. Smart content can be set up to show viewers different content based on their location, their device, their lifecycle stage, their buyer persona, or actions they have completed on the website (content they’ve downloaded, or pages they’ve viewed).

93. Social Monitoring 

The act of monitoring specific social users. Social monitoring is especially useful for Twitter. Marketers can create Twitter streams using tools like TweetDeck, or HubSpot’s Social Inbox that only show tweets from specific users or that include a certain word. This can help identify needs or opportunities to share helpful information. Social monitoring is often used synonymously with “social listening.”

94. Synergy 

When multiple marketing channels work together to communicate the same message. Synergy is an integral part of any marketing campaign. Many times the most successful marketing takes place by creatively using different marketing channels in complementary ways.

95. Thank-You Page

When a prospect clicks on a call-to-action and is taken to the landing page and fills out a form to download gated content and thus becomes a lead, they should then be taken to a thank-you page. A thank-you page is a great way to move the viewer farther down the buyer’s journey. The thank-you page thanks the viewer for their interest in the offer and then can show them related offers, or direct them to look at some other aspect of the site. This fits into the decision stage of the buyer’s journey, close and delight stages of the inbound marketing methodology.

96. Value Added Reseller (VAR) 

A company or person that resells a product, usually software and provides certain value over and beyond the particular product or service to be sold. For example providing additional services apart from selling a software in terms of its maintenance, upkeep and installation.

97. Webinar 

A piece of high-value content, a webinar is a great way for a company to educate their buyer personas about a problem and establish themselves as thought leaders. Webinars should be “gated“, or put behind a form on a landing page.

98. Workflow 

A system of nourishing leads down the buyer’s journey through email marketing. They are a series of emails that a marketer can set up in their marketing automation to send out to leads who perform certain actions on a website. The workflow would then send out a series of emails designed to keep the lead interested in the company and prepare them to purchase the company’s product or service.

IV. Sales and Customer Relationships:

99. BANT 

(Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) An acronym used by sales reps to determine whether a contact has the budget, authority, need, and timeline to purchase their products and services. This calculates and gives a value to the ability of a lead to buy their product and turn into a prospective customer. Different companies employ different measuring and valuing techniques as they deem fit.

100. Blog 

Business blogging is one of many components of inbound marketing. Having a relatable and informative blog on a business’s website can help a business increase traffic, conversions, improve SEO, and do several positive things for a website. Blogs fit into the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey.

101. Buyer Personas 

A semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. It is a characteristic of the potential buyer sketched by the marketer to design the marketing selling tactics around and about this persona to successfully onboard the client while adjusting to their demands and needs.

102. Channel Partner 

A company or person that partners with a manufacturer or producer to market the manufacturer’s products, services, or technologies. A value-added reseller (VAR) is an example of a channel partner.

103. Cold Calling 

A form of outbound marketing where a person calls random people that may or may not be interested in the hopes to sell them a product or service.

104. Sales Funnel 

A visual representation of the journey that buyers take from strangers to customers of your company that the marketing team uses to categorize contacts. The top of the funnel represents people who are farther away from buying (strangers, visitors, subscribers) and the bottom of the funnel represents people who are closer to buying (SQL‘s, Opportunities, Customers, Evangelists). The company employs various attribution methods to rank such leads.

105. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)  

A lead that has been determined to have the ability to purchase your company’s products or services. A sales qualified lead is then passed from the marketing team to the sales team to hopefully be closed into a customer. It comes as a next qualifying step after the Marketing Qualified Lead or MQL.

The ideal scenario for every business is to sell to high-intent customers and not waste time on unqualified leads. This is achievable through ABM - Account-Based Marketing.

ABM helps weed out companies that do not fit a business’s ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). Doing so ensures that the efforts of marketing and sales teams align to convert best-fit customers.

In 2022, Foundry conducted an ABM & Intent Benchmarking Study. It revealed that 94% of the 500 B2B technology marketers surveyed rate ABM as extremely important in their overall marketing objectives.

TL;DR

• Account-Based Marketing is a strategy to identify high-intent accounts and target them with personalized campaigns.
• ABM helps find best-fit customers, enabling sales and marketing teams to build and nurture relationships with them throughout the sales cycle.
• Take into account factors such as ACV, TAM, product category (is it a new product or an established one) and organization size of your target accounts (SMB, mid, or enterprise) when deciding if ABM is the right strategy for your business.
• Streamline your ABM efforts, measure and analyze their effect on KPIs, and optimize your strategy based on your results.

What is ABM?

Account Based Marketing (ABM) is a marketing strategy focusing on a specific set of target accounts to build awareness and engagement amongst them and eventually convert them into customers.

Types of ABM

There are broadly 3 ways to execute ABM: One-to-One, One-to-Few, and One-to-Many. For each type, we have listed the top engagement programs & metrics used for tracking

1. One-to-One ABM

In this highly customized approach, the engagement is focused on a small set of accounts (Average: 39, Median: 14)* with the highest revenue potential. Existing customers are mostly targeted here (~80%).

Engagement Programs

• One-on-one Meetings, Workshops, Lunch and Learn Meetings to build relationships
• Highly personalized content via emails, advertisements, and dedicated microsites
• Extensive and consistent research on account for gathering actionable insights

Key ABM Metrics 

• Pipeline
• Revenue
• Number of Target Accounts engaged meaningfully (showed high intent such as demo request).
• Number of Accounts where a specific Persona (say VP, Finance) has been engaged.

2. One-to-Few (or Sales Addressable Market)

In this approach, the engagement is performed in a segmented fashion by grouping accounts with similar characteristics. The average number of accounts in this list is 177, with a median of 50*. Both new and existing accounts are targeted here at an equal share.

Engagement Programs

• One-on-one Meetings, roadshows, and virtual events
• Digital advertising, custom email campaigns, and microsites with segment-specific communication
• Tailored outreach campaigns

Key ABM Metrics

• Pipeline
• Revenue
• Number of Target accounts engaged meaningfully.
• Average Number of Contacts Engaged within a Target Account.
• Number of Accounts where a specific Persona has been engaged.

3. One-to-Many (or Total Addressable Market)

In this approach, the engagement takes place at a larger scale, with hundreds to thousands of accounts having the lowest revenue potential. The focus is greater on new customers (70%) than on existing ones (30%).

Engagement Programs

• Virtual events and roadshows
• Targeted demand-generation campaigns with lower customization levels

Key ABM Metrics

• Pipeline
• Revenue  
• Number of Leads from ICP.
• Number of ICP accounts engaged.
• Number of Touchpoints from ICP Accounts.
• Average Number of contacts engaged within a Target Account.
• Number of Accounts where a specific Persona has been engaged.

Advantages & Benefits of ABM

Advantages

• Focuses on a specific set of target accounts only, making it more quality-focused
• Aligns Marketing and Sales teams efficiently
• Utilized to accelerate pipeline through strategic engagement with accounts.
• Gives a better Customer Experience with the level of personalization throughout the engagement.

Do Consider:

• ABM requires a significant amount of investment and patience before you begin to see results.
• Identifying a contact and relevant stakeholders within a target account is a difficult task, especially when the account size is large.

Benefits of ABM

1. Personalized marketing

Account-based marketing focuses on providing personalized campaigns that directly address the pain points of high-value accounts. This personalization helps empathize with the prospects and show that the business understands their challenges and can provide valid solutions. 

2. Build and nurture relationships

ABM also involves engaging prospects with customized messages at each stage of the sales cycle. By engaging with them at every stage, businesses can build a deep understanding of their needs and challenges and provide more personalized solutions. 

By doing so, businesses can build strong and credible relationships with their prospects.

3. Align marketing and sales team

With ABM, the marketing initiative will be more targeted and purposeful for the sales team to align directly with marketing goals.

By doing so, both teams can keep each other accountable for their specific goals. Additionally, this allows them to identify the purpose-driven activities that address the unique needs of each account.

For example, the marketing team will be responsible for creating and distributing highly customized content that speaks directly to the needs of the target accounts. At the same time, the sales team will be accountable for developing and nurturing relationships with key decision-makers. 

4. Higher ROI

ABM focuses on a set of high-value accounts that meet your ICP criteria rather than focusing on a broader audience. And by targeting these high-value accounts with personalized campaigns, ABM can reduce the overall marketing cost and increase the likelihood of converting these accounts into paying customers.

Therefore, the ROI of ABM campaigns is higher than traditional marketing campaigns that focus on a wider audience.

Is ABM the right marketing strategy for you?

Even though ABM has been trending for some time now and many organizations have seen success using it, you should always take a step back and analyze where your business stands before moving forward. Here’s a small checklist for you:

Annual Contract Value (ACV)

Since ABM involves a significant investment, calculate the ACV for your target accounts and determine the resulting ROI. Then ask yourself, is it worth the effort? 

In case you’re at crossroads and have only 3-4 high-value accounts, you can also follow a mixed approach wherein you adopt ABM for those accounts and other strategies like Demand Gen for others.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

Your TAM is the revenue opportunity available for your product in the entire market. If you have a small TAM, ABM might be a good fit since you can easily personalize your engagement strategy for the target accounts. 

In case you have a large TAM, consider using ABM. You will need to put in more effort to narrow down target accounts and, thereafter, create personalized engagement strategies.

Established vs. New Product Category

Similarly, if you have a product in a new category for which the initial demand is bound to be low, ABM will be a good strategy for you. 

You can identify the key accounts and engage with them with tailored programs. In case your product belongs to an established category, you can still use ABM to target the top 15-20 accounts generating the most revenue for you.

SMB vs. Mid Market vs. Enterprise

If your target market is SMB, Inbound marketing rather than ABM might be a better fit for you. It is based on the assumption that the ROI from this market for ABM is lower.

If your target market is Mid-Market, ABM can be considered for high-revenue potential accounts while using Inbound as one of the primary channels.

If your target market is an Enterprise, you should definitely adopt a highly tailored ABM plan for each account in the target list. Converted accounts should be given equal focus to improve retention rates and advocacy.

You may experiment with ABM and then scale based on your results. However, the key to ABM is patience. It may take a significant amount of resources, both in terms of time and people, before you actually see the results (depending on your sales cycle). Therefore, it is worth gauging all metrics before beginning with ABM.

4 Steps to Streamline Your ABM Efforts

ABM is all about connecting with the right buyer at the right time with the right message. You can increase the efficiency of your ABM efforts by following a few steps. 

1. Gather your data sources for a complete view of account activity from the visitor's very first interaction. It will enable you to make decisions on account-level customizations.
2. Prepare a list of target accounts based on revenue potential and intent data.
3. Develop a concise engagement plan (content, ad communication) for all the accounts/segments. While planning, consider how advanced the account is in the buyer funnel.
4. Measure and analyze the impact of ABM on your KPIs and plan the next steps based on the results.

Conclusion

This brings us to the end of this article. It’s quite easy to get lost in the discussion of what ABM is, its various advantages, and its benefits. The key objective of ABM is to show that you empathize with your target audience's pain points and provide a solution that alleviates their pain. 

ABM analytics software such as Factors can help you identify various high-intent accounts visiting your website. It can also track their journey on the website and provide insights into how they engage with the content. Sales teams can use this information to tailor email campaigns, sales calls, and other efforts to target those accounts individually and improve engagement and conversions. 

Engage with high-profile accounts regularly as they progress through the buyer journey. Monitor your metrics and optimize your ABM efforts based on the revenue generated. Continuously engaging and putting effort into building meaningful relationships with your visitors and leads will make your ABM strategy more effective and efficient.

Podcasts are bigger than ever. The number of series worldwide have shot up from an already sizeable 500,000 in 2018 to a whopping 2 million in 2021. Unsurprisingly, podcast consumption has also been rising steadily over the past 15 years. In fact, nearly 60% of all American adults report that they’ve listened to at least one episode this year.

And Videos? They're bigger still. A third of all online sessions are spent consuming videos — everything from sleep talking cats to educational/explainer videos. To sit down and watch every single one published over the past month alone would require approximately 5 million years. And the best part? Nearly all of this is available on the internet for free. As a result, audio/visual content is more accessible, and hence, more popular than ever before.

The opportunistic folk that we are, B2B marketers have taken little time to capitalize on this wave. I can’t remember the last time I scrolled through my Linkedin feed without stumbling across a post for a friend’s friend’s colleague’s boss’s brand new B2B SaaS RevOps podcast. In fact, upwards of 85% of businesses today produce audio/video content as part of their marketing efforts. They are by far the fastest growing marketing channels out there.

And why not? 

Just like any other marketing channel, podcasts and videos can be effective mediums to communicate a specific message to a specific set of people. They are relatively easy to ideate, produce, and distribute. They require little investment from either the supplier or the consumer. And they’re far more palatable than a 20-page white paper. 

Yet, while audio/video content can be valuable assets, marketers face one glaring issue when it comes to identifying and measuring their ROI in terms of conversions — trackability. As is the case with any marketing activity, marketers are keen to understand how their content is performing. However, since anyone can listen to a podcast, or watch a YouTube video anonymously through any device, it becomes nearly impossible to accurately track how your content is contributing to pipeline and revenue. 

How then must a marketer go about gauging their content's performance? 

While there is no perfect solution to this quandary yet, here are a few tips to indirectly optimize your attribution process:

1. Unique URLs

Create a unique URL for every podcast/video you produce. Drive all your marketing efforts (social media posts, emails, etc) towards that URL. And use that URL as a proxy to track detailed information on who’s landing on your page. Once this data is consolidated, it can be stitched onto the remainder of your customer journey (ads, website, CRM, etc) using Factors.AI. Ultimately, this will indirectly provide insights into your content's pipeline contribution.

2. Distinct promo codes

Along similar lines as the previous point, it might be worth employing distinct promo codes for each piece of content you release. The logic behind this is that when a prospect enters a specific code, it provides an immediate signal as to where they’re coming from. This information can then be accounted for in your CRM for further analyses. That being said, a few issues may occur if listeners/viewers refer the promo codes to their networks. As there’s no automated method to verify the same, one may run the risk of corrupting their datasets and insights. 

3. Don’t forget your Guests

Speaking of recording contact data into your CRM, always ensure you do the same with your guests as well. More often than not, guests are invited to marketing podcasts for two of two reasons — one; they’re experienced professionals with vast knowledge on the topic of discussion. And two; they themselves fit the Ideal Client Profile (ICP) that the host company is going after. Inviting a guest onto a podcast is often simply a wind-about route to securing a demo call. With this in mind, it’s important to account for your guests. This way, if they do eventually close a deal with you, the podcast is present as a definite touchpoint. 

4. Just ask!

Audio/Visual content attribution is a real challenge. There are only so many behind-the-scenes steps you can take to optimize for an accurate customer journey. That being said, one sure shot approach to tackling this evasive phenomenon is to simply  ask your customer about their journey to purchase. Maybe a friend told them about it, maybe they read a positive review on ProductHunt, or maybe, just maybe; they loved that one demo video you released last week! Either way, it doesn’t hurt to ask. 
And there we have it!

Though they’re far from perfect, we’ve covered a few simple tricks to track customers who become customers as a result of a degree of influence by your AV content. Listen/View counts and geographical metrics are decent metrics to gauge content performance. But drilling down into who is sliding down the funnel as a result of your content is pivotal. Using unique URLs and Promo codes, and making a habit of accounting for your guests are great ways to grasp a high-level understanding of your content's contribution to revenue and pipeline. And if it comes down to it, just asking your customer about their journey will also be fruitful .

The following post is the second part of our “Attribution is Broken” series.

Here’s a link to the introductory post if you’re interested.

I recently came across an Instagram ad for a shiny new pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Being the mindless sheep I am, I decided that I needed a pair. So after some light research involving a few customer reviews and price comparisons, I went ahead and bought them. From start to finish, the purchase process took me about an hour or so. Admittedly, the headphones set me back a little but who cares? I can always return them if I’m not happy right? This was a short and sweet journey that’s easily digestible by most multi-touch attribution tools. And yet, this journey takes quite the turn when marketers want to reach out to businesses instead. 

B2B purchase decisions are tricky affairs. They involve complex high-value contracts, lengthy sales cycles that stretch over several months, and limited scope for backtracking once confirmed. As a result, all B2B purchases — especially those made in technology — are critical decisions. So, to mitigate the risk of making poor purchases, organisations include multiple stakeholders across multiple departments over multiple levels of seniority in their decision-making process. As an unfortunate consequence, however, this involvement of heterogeneous stakeholders tremendously complicates the account’s journey from awareness to purchase. 

Here’s a simple example of a complex B2B sales cycle:

HubForce, a promising CRM start-up takes out a couple of ads on Linkedin and Facebook.   They also publish content in the form of blogs and host interactive webinars on a regular basis. Additionally, HubForce’s SDR team requests demo meetings from CSOs, Demand Gen VPs, and Project Managers on a daily basis through outbound emails.

Ali, who is project head at Drifter (a leading chatbot service provider), receives one such mail. Ali happens to be in the market for a CRM tool and schedules a demo with HubForce. HubForce’s sales head, Vinay, walks Ali through the several technical features they have to offer. This includes HubForce’s ability to integrate with Drifter’s current tech stack and a cutting-edge AI tool that automates a lot of Ali’s grunt work. Ali is impressed and wants to onboard Hubforce. However, he needs to run the purchase decision by his CEO, Anaiya, before making it official.

Upon hearing Ali’s rave reviews, Anaiya is curious to learn a little more about HubForce.       She reads a couple of their blog posts and digs up a few reviews written by existing customers. Being a fastidious CEO, Anaiya also schedules a follow-up meeting with Vinay. This time around, Vinay demonstrates what HubForce can bring to Drifter’s revenue and sales pipeline. Rather than zone in on technical details, Vinay focuses on HubForce’s big-picture gains instead.  Anaiya likes what she sees but wants to discuss their budget constraints with her finance chief, Albert, before signing on the dotted line.

During their weekly catch-up, Anaiya fills Albert in on the HubForce deal — specifically the pricing details. Albert isn’t thrilled. He’s of the opinion that Drifter would be overpaying for what’s essentially a roided-out excel. Upon hearing this, Anaiya decides to put the deal on hold until next quarter. During this time, Albert is frequently targeted by HubForce ads on Linkedin. He even attends one of Hubforce’s webinars on their cutting-edge, AI-powered CRM technology. Eventually, Albert is convinced of the value that the CRM platform could bring to Drifter.

As the next quarter rolls around, Ali, Anaiya, and Albert discuss the deal one last time. They weigh the pros and cons and arrive at a unanimous decision to purchase a HubForce subscription. Congratulations you guys!

Clearly, the previous purchasing process was far more complex than the case of the headphones. A nuanced web of back and forth interactions had to take place before the deal could be closed. As a marketer looking to replicate this process in a scalable manner, multi-touch attribution is your go-to tool. Attribution modelling empowers marketers to unravel their intricate customer journeys, and understand the performance of nearly every marketing activity. Attribution reveals, to a large extent, what campaigns are working, and what campaigns aren’t. In turn, marketers can make data-driven resource allocations across their marketing activities. All that being said, attribution isn’t without its challenges when it comes to dealing with multiple stakeholders.

Across the length of the previous example, HubForce depended on a variety of content, strategies, and channels to get their deal across the line. They had to sell different aspects of their products to different types of audiences. Project managers may care about practical details like integration, accessibility, and time-saving. CEOs may be interested in high-level gains like ROI, pipeline, and revenue. Finance heads want to know that they’re getting the best possible price. On top of all this, each position is filled by individuals with their own motivations and preferences. The one-on-one demo clearly worked for Ali, but Anaiya chose to perform some background research as well. Albert, on the other hand, was convinced after a couple of targeted ads and a relevant webinar. All these variables contribute to the challenges of B2B attribution:

The B2B Buyer Dichotomy

B2B marketers engage with individual contacts through personalised emails, targeted ads, etc. However, the purchase decision ultimately involves a buying committee. In the example discussed above, there are three stakeholder groups that make up the buying committee- the core buying group (Ali and his project team), the group that focuses on negotiating terms (Albert and his finance team), and finally, the group which exercises the final approval (Anaiya, the CEO).

The core buying group initiates the process by identifying the need for the product, ideates on the potential solutions, and looks for options. The group that negotiates the terms will focus more on protecting the company’s interests. This involves the members from teams like legal and finance. Lastly, the final approval stakeholder group has the final say or authority. The focus of this group is to look at the company’s larger aims and strategy implementations. 

The marketer has to align these diverse internal stakeholders during the sales journey.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

Now that the different internal stakeholders within the buying committee have different core focuses, the marketer needs to adjust their approach to each group depending on what they care about. For instance, in our example, finance cares more about the pricing, while the CEO cares about the revenue and ROI, and finally, the marketing team would care about metrics like conversions, pipeline, etc.

In addition to this, the sales cycle is often complicated and non-linear. Complex B2B purchases such as enterprise software, have a lot more information for the buying committee to consider. This process becomes more drawn out with the complexity of the solution and the presence of alternatives. The multiple stakeholders in an account who have different preferences and objectives, may revisit the various stages of the buying process non-sequentially and sometimes, simultaneously. The stakeholder behavior can also be loopy where they may switch between being interested to not interested to being interested again, as we saw in our example.

Each stakeholder group keeps referring to each other in non-linear learning loops before they come to the final decision of moving forward with the purchase or not.

Invisible Touchpoints

The touchpoints in our sales cycle are of different types. While digital ads, reviews, page views are visible, there may be some that are invisible. Attribution models trying to map stakeholders might be unable to account for these touchpoints. For instance, in our HubForce example,  the finance head, who was not entirely on board with the CRM purchase, attends a webinar which finally leads to the deal being won. Data issues can arise if your CRM and marketing automation data are not flowing properly. In this case, if the impact of the webinar has not been stitched in the sales journey.

Today, most B2B marketers employ a single attribution model across a fixed timeline to derive insights from their campaign data. Sure, this approach is easy, quick, and uncomplicated. But it is also dangerously inaccurate. The issues brought on by the involvement of several stakeholders (Heterogeneous preferences and objectives, long sales cycles, loopy (back and forth) behavior of interest, and a diverse range of touchpoints) render simple attribution modelling ineffective. Instead, marketers should aim to treat each group of users independently and attempt to learn what works best for each one of them. This involves parsing out each type of customer and individually employing the appropriate model. This approach allows you to ask nuanced questions and derive genuinely actionable insights. Of course, this is a far more advanced process than an all-encompassing approach — but it’s infinitely more accurate as well. 

So what’s the solution for implementing incredibly advanced attribution models? 

Well, an incredibly advanced attribution platform of course! 

Learn more about Factors.AI cutting-edge attribution here.

In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model-T to the world with a full-page advertisement in Life magazine. The print ad read like an article and was chock-full of technical jargon by design. Back then, a marketer’s function was straightforward — inform all potential customers of the existence and superiority of the product. Who you were marketing to wasn’t half as important as what you were marketing. As long as buyers in the market were aware of the Model-T’s vanadium steel chassis and four-cylinder engine, Ford’s marketing team could sleep well at night knowing they had done their jobs.

Of course, the role of the marketer has evolved *a little* since then. At the time, print ads were one of the few viable communication channels available to marketers. There was also a stubborn focus on the product itself — with little thought given to what worked for each customer. Owing to years of progress in marketing technology and a radical shift towards customer centricity, marketers today have a lot more to think about. Recent digital transformations have empowered marketers with dozens of channels: social media, email, blogs, videos, podcasts, websites, etc.  In turn, they’re able to reach potential customers with content that’s specifically tailored to them. 

On the other side of the equation, digital transformation has also provided customers with far more control. Relevant market information (product details, reviews, alternatives) is instantly accessible to potential buyers. And when your competitors are a single click away from you, there is no room for complacency. As a result, the modern marketer must go above and beyond traditional information distribution. Today, the four staple functions performed by marketers are: 

• Delivering predictable pipeline and revenue 
• Building the company’s brand 
• Developing long-term growth initiatives 
• And empowering the sales team 
  

Still, as marketing has evolved in terms of technology and practice, analysing data and deriving insights have grown increasingly complex as well. While marketers are able to design sophisticated multi-channel campaigns, determining the basic metrics — what’s working, what’s not, which campaigns to invest in, etc. — can become tricky. Here’s an example to illustrate this: 

Gendesk, a help desk software start-up, takes out advertisements on Youtube and Facebook. Deepti, a customer success VP, stumbles upon the YouTube ad while trying to watch a video of a sleep-talking cat. She takes notice of Gendesk and clicks through to their website. Though she likes what she sees, she forgets to sign up for a demo. Later that week, Deepti comes across the Facebook ad while scrolling through her feed. This time, she ensures to schedule a call and finds the product to be a great fit. After discussing with her team, Deepti decides to make the purchase.  

As a marketer, this is great news. But when you’re looking to repeat this process in a scalable manner, a key question to ask yourself is “Which ad do I credit for the purchase decision?” Though there are cases to be made for each ad, the right answer is a subtle combination of both. Identifying this combination of credit, or in other words; determining the values to attribute to the various touch-points along the customer journey is now the holy grail of marketing analytics.     

Enter: Marketing Attribution

The previous example was based on a highly simplified customer journey — one customer and two channels. In reality, marketers target several types of customers and employ several different channels to engage with their audience. What’s more is that the buyer’s journey is almost never a linear path. Deepti may well have stumbled upon the youtube ad, visited Gendesk’s website, interacted with their chatbot, reviewed the pricing page, read a blog about the product, and clicked back to the website before coming across the Facebook ad and making his purchase. Marketing attribution is a tremendously powerful system that determines these various touch-points along the customer journey and attributes a percentage value to each one of them.   

Okay, but why’s marketing attribution so important anyway?  

“The reality is that marketing has become THE most efficient way to accelerate growth in our digital economy. The imperative is to connect the dots, so each marketing expense dollar is aligned and reported against revenue growth.”

- Paul Albright of Captora. 

A well-oiled marketing attribution system can result in efficiency gains of up to 30%. At its core, attribution modeling enables marketers to allocate resources in a strategic manner. Marketers can ensure that they’re actively driving conversions by optimizing their spending based on data-driven metrics. Zendesk’s marketing team, for example, can use a variety of attribution models to derive an understanding of what campaigns are working, and what campaigns aren’t. Accordingly, they can make evidence-based decisions on where to invest and what to alter. Ultimately, this results in a notable rise in ROI, a stronger grasp of SEO/SEM, and an improved alignment between marketing and sales. On average, marketers employ at least 6 communication channels to reach their customers today. As this number continues to rise, attribution will only become increasingly critical to the success of modern marketing initiatives. 

________

All that being said, marketing attribution isn’t without its challenges. In fact, even after the emergence of highly effective multi-touch models, several organizations continue to report attribution manually through spreadsheets. 

There are many considerations that go into choosing the right attribution model which can present several challenges for the marketer:

The Sales Cycle: 

Attribution is a lagging indicator. It takes time and patience to see if models are working. Based on the length of the sales cycle, the effects of a new campaign or changes made into existing ones will reflect much later into the future.

Ease of Set-up and Implementation: 

30% of companies in the UK say that they have chosen their current attribution model based on ease of use. If put in a position to choose between a model that is easy to implement and a complex model that would be tedious for the team to implement, marketing heads would prefer the simpler model. Similarly, technological limitations may also hinder the execution and implementation of attribution models. 

A Culture of Data and Measurement: 

To be able to value the insights provided by attribution models, there needs to be a culture of measurement and accuracy within marketing teams.

Communication of Insights: 

Communicating the insights from the model is significant for communicating cost justification as well as for taking action based on the insights from attribution. To get funds and approvals for software costs, and implementation costs in terms of time, effort, and training, the team needs to be able to communicate the insights well and accurately.

Attribution to Improve, Not Prove: 

Marketers often use attribution to prove that campaigns are working. As mentioned in the earlier section, this is important to be able to justify costs. However, limiting attribution to this purpose can lead to lost insights and higher costs. Attribution, at its core, is directional in nature. Attribution models can be used to see what is working well and also to check what is not working and needs to be abandoned. Marketing and Sales teams are often working on several kinds of campaigns and this is a useful tool to see which campaigns are performing better and can be emulated in future projects.

Volume bias: 

Most often, an organisation’s highest volume campaign can show up as its most successful campaign if marketers do not track other metrics like conversion rate and win rate. To understand, let’s consider the example of an organisation that sells CRM software to businesses. Say in the last six months, they saw a total of 500 downloads, out of which 400 were attributed to Campaign A which was implemented in the form of in-person promotional events like webinars while the remaining 100 were attributed to Campaign B which was implemented in the form of ads on YouTube and Instagram. By themselves, these numbers make it seem like Campaign A was the more successful campaign. But what if we find that the 400 downloads were made by customers from a total of 10,000 attendees in those in-person events while the remaining 100 from the second campaign were made by customers out of a total of 500 users who were presented with the ads. So if we look at the conversion rates for Campaigns A and B, we see that they were 4% and 20% respectively. This comparison could possibly give us the insight that if Campaign B was promoted further, with more funds and effort directed towards it, the organisation might’ve seen more downloads of its software with the it’s higher conversion rate relative to Campaign A.

Absence of predetermined hypotheses: 

To get effective insights from an attribution model, marketers need to be specific about what they’re trying to measure. For example, say the conversion rate for leads from campaign X within the period of the last 30 days since it went live for geographic location Y- can be used to understand if a campaign was successful within the target audience from that location. If marketers do not know what exactly they are looking for, they will end up giving an overall attribution report and miss out on gainful insights.

Invisible touchpoints: 

Several attribution models being used by organisations do not account for certain important touchpoints. Models that do not track the relationship between online activity and offline sales may lead to digital signal bias. For eg. one might have seen the ad for a clothing app on Instagram but they decide to go to the store and purchase the item. Models that do not include sales touches may not include the impact of sales actions. On one hand, it may hamper the accuracy of the outcome metrics and on the other, it may cause disarray with the sales teams instead of aiding collaboration between the two teams.

In order to choose the right attribution model for your team and reap the benefits that attribution brings to modern marketing, marketers need to be wary of these challenges and address them.

In further blog posts, we will be exploring the various challenges of attribution that we have outlined here in greater detail.