How do you attribute sales to your marketing?
Is it the content that eventually creates a sales opp? The value-packed webinars? The visit to your booth at a conference?
In this clip from B2B Forum 2023, Tish Millsap shares four different attribution models. Which of these four can you use to attribute sales to your marketing efforts?
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We’re going to start by defining the model types.
And there’s four different categories that I’m going to present:
Influence models, single touch models, multi-touch models, and custom models.
And there are actually hundreds of different permutations of these types, but this is a good way for us to get started.
For the purposes of this session, I’m going to use this scenario to go through all the model types. Hopefully this will make it easy for you to compare and contrast the different models.
I’m going to refer to all the engagements as touch points.
I will probably say the word touch points like a hundred times during the session, but the touch points are basically what are you using as the inputs to the model.
I’ve color coded them so that you can follow along and understand how each attribution model works with this particular scenario.
So let’s say that your prospect attended a webinar. They engaged in a free trial. They were a visitor at your booth at a trade show.
And then an opp was created.
And then, after the opp was created, they downloaded a white paper from your website—but before the opp was closed.
And in this example, we’re able to connect all of these touch points to a single deal in the amount of a hundred thousand dollars.
I’ve also included anonymous website visits.
Most attribution solutions cannot give credit to an anonymous touch point. But there are some tools out there that can do it, so I wanted to include it. And we’ll talk more later about the issues around using anonymous website visits as part of your model.
I also want to note that any of these touch points could be done from separate people—as long as they roll up to the same account—or it could all be from the same person.
Alright, let’s start with the influence model.
So the influence model, as you can see, gives a hundred percent of the attribution to each one of these touches. So each one is going to get a hundred thousand dollars.
Obviously this can be a bit problematic. If you start adding up the campaigns, all of a sudden your total amount of revenue seems outrageous and doesn’t really work.
But I don’t want you to discount the usefulness of an influence model. It’s actually super easy to set up in Salesforce. It’s Salesforce native functionality. And you can get going really fast.
And if you are an organization that has a hard time buying and implementing new tools, I highly encourage you to look at the influence model.
It’s great to start with a model that may not be perfect for you if it’s just easy to get going on it.
Second, it is a type of multi-touch attribution.
I gave it its own category because one of the defining characteristics of a multi-touch model is this calculator, but essentially the influence model does include all the touch points that influenced a single deal.
And finally, the influence model is just easy to understand. If somebody comes to you and says, “hey, that webinar that you ran two months ago, what opportunities has that influenced?” You can tell them a single number and you don’t have to explain how the calculator works in your multi-touch attribution model. And I actually use this model with some very big companies.
Alright, so now we’re going to talk about single-touch models.
The basic idea of a single-touch model is that a hundred percent of the attribution goes to a single touch point. And you can pick any touch point along the buyer’s journey that you want to be able to understand the attribution with.
I have two examples here.
The first one is the first touch model, and this allows you to understand the source of leads that become opportunities. Obviously, to answer this kind of question, you might want to be able to include those anonymous website visits. And if you can, then the first touch point would be this Google search and not a webinar.
The other single-touch model I have here is a last touch model. It focuses on the touch point just prior to opportunity creation, which is helpful in understanding what’s driving prospects to become opportunities.
So I think single-touch models are great at providing these kinds of answers. And I also like using them with businesses that have very short sales cycles, like less than 30 days.
And single-touch models are also something that you can build inside of Salesforce. You don’t need a tool to do this, although tools do it better.
All right, so let’s talk about multi-touch attribution!
So the whole reason that multi-touch attribution came into play is that we really understood that there’s a variety of touch points that actually influence a closed-won deal, and that could happen over a long period of time. And they could be sales activities, it could be marketing activities.
And while the influence model kind of does this, it has this calculator problem.
But the multi-touch model actually has a calculator in it and it spreads that evenly. And then all the touch points add up to the actual revenue number.
In this case, there are four touch points.
So we take that hundred thousand dollars and we break it into four. So each piece gets 25%.
Now if there are five touch points, each would get 20%. If there are 10 touch points, each would get 10%.
So you kind of get the idea of how that works.
But this does require a tool. I once tried to build this without a tool and it never really got it to work. So I definitely recommend, if you want to do any type of multi-touch attribution, that you consider buying a tool.
Alright, so here’s a summary of all the different kinds of multi-touch models:
There’s the J shape, the inverse J shape, the U shape, the W shape, and the time decay model—in addition to the even spread model that I just described.
These are the ones that I’ve heard about. So if there’s anyone in the room who has used another kind of multi-touch model, I would really love to hear about it.
But for each, I’ve provided a pie chart that kind of shows how it allocates the revenue based on the timing of how the touch points happen in our scenario.
Here’s the thing, guys—and this is something that confuses a lot of people about multi-touch models—is that these models weigh the touch points differently based on when they happen, not based on the type of interaction that they are.
That means anything that you input into your model gets the same weight. It’s only differentiated based on the timing.
So this is where you’re going to want to start thinking about the inputs to your model.
And if the model’s going to give the same type of attribution, you want to make sure every touch point indicates a similar amount of impact.
So the example scenario does this really well.
You have a webinar attendee. You have somebody who attended your trade show. Somebody who engaged with your free trial. Those are all the same kind of level of engagement.
But if you start inputting things in your model like email clicks, well then you might have a problem because it’s not really balancing it based on the type of engagement. So I just want you to keep that in mind as we talk about a couple of these.
I took these five shapes here, the five pie charts here, and I gave you an individual slide on each one so you can also see how it works.
I don’t have time to go through all of them.
But I am going to talk about the W shape, because it’s a really common model that’s out there.
So the W shape model, it gives 30% to the first touch, 30% to the conversion point, and 30% to the last touch. And then it takes the remaining 10% and spreads it out across all the other touch points.
So if you had 10 other touch points, each would get 1%. But we only have one, so it gets the full 10%.
This model is really good if you want to understand those key inflection points in the buyer’s journey.
Published August 28, 2024
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