Why is Attribution So Important?

Have you ever gotten less credit for something than you deserve? Whether this question calls to mind a group project from college, getting passed over for an award, or that time your frenemy ripped off your signature recipe and sold out the bake sale, these memories don’t have to be recent for us all to agree: it doesn’t feel great. When a job is well-done, it deserves to be recognized. In the environment of professional marketing, this is why we need attribution.

What is attribution and why is it important? Marketing attribution is how a team figures out which pieces of content, and content channels, are the rockstars who deserve the gold ribbon. Luckily, this isn’t based on personal opinions, but rather the hard data you can track and collect about how audiences interact with your content. 

Today, most customer journeys take place across multiple devices, with customers clicking on ads, watching videos, visiting the website, and reading content before making the decision to buy, subscribe, click, or call. Marketing attribution helps you understand how, in what order, and how often audiences are engaging with all this content—that, and a whole lot more. 

Digital Marketing Attribution Helps You Understand Your Audiences

First and foremost, marketing attribution is so important because it helps you understand your target audiences. Marketers all work with a set of researched assumptions about their audiences and what they value. This includes everything from the content channels they prefer to the topics they want to learn about, and even the tone of voice they like to hear and be entertained or educated by. 

Digital marketing attribution helps businesses and marketers either confirm or reexamine the information they have collected (and projected) about their audiences. Maybe you’ve assumed a specific article would perform really well on LinkedIn, while a video would be more popular distributed through email. But if your attribution data tells you that the video is getting tons of attention on social, while the article is the main clickbait in your email, that means you know more about the audience now—and how to reach them better next time. 

Marketing Attribution Helps You Control the Marketing Budget

Secondly, marketing attribution is important because it helps teams make more educated decisions about how to allocate the budget. To stick with the above example, if you spent a lot of money boosting the article on LinkedIn, or designing an email template to promote the video, that can now be identified as a cost that should not be budgeted in the future. 

Where marketing attribution really helps control the budget is with search ads and pay-per-click budgets. Real-time attribution data can help marketers see minute-to-minute which investments are attracting the most clicks and traffic, and reallocate the spend to amplify those successful pieces while spending less on the low performers.

Your Attribution Model Can Change Based on Your Goals

Lastly, marketing attribution is important because it’s a source of information that can be tailored to speak to the goals of each campaign or strategy. For instance, if you have published lots of content recently and just want to know which pieces are the final closers in your sales funnel, last click attribution would weight all the credit toward those pieces that attracted the final click before a customer made a buying decision. Or, if you would rather see the customer’s journey along the path to making a purchase, a time-decay model gives some credit to all the pieces, with more credit weighted toward the recent clicks. Other attribution models attribute a proportion of the credit to the first click that caught consumer attention. 

The nice thing is, you don’t have to choose just one model and use it for all your attribution. If your goal for one campaign is different from some of the overall strategic marketing goals, approaching the attribution differently can help you understand how well the campaign performed in context. 

Set the Attribution Marketing Example With DemandJump

Marketing attribution is important because it helps you understand which content is driving lead conversions, and therefore driving revenue. This insight helps you control your marketing budget, and better speak to your audiences on their terms. But applied correctly, the insights of marketing attribution help you step out as a content leader in your industry and win traffic away from the competition. 

We’re proud to say this outcome is especially true for the users of the DemandJump platform. Built-in functionality allow users to switch back and forth between marketing attribution model visualizations on-demand, achieving full insight and changing the model at a moment’s notice. Pulling in cross-channel data means Demand Jump provides real-time understanding of which social channels, ads, and content sources are getting the most engagement. And, competitor insights displayed right alongside are the final piece of the puzzle to outrank and outperform the others. 

While your content pieces won’t get their feelings hurt if they aren’t given adequate credit for their success, it could have serious consequences for the business. Demand Jump enables content marketing made simple, and marketing attribution made easy. Sign up for a free trial today and experience the difference for yourself.