Unraveling Marketing Impact vs. Attribution: ChannelMix’s Full Funnel Analytics Approach

In the world of B2B, clients’ journeys are often intricate webs with numerous touchpoints spread across multiple marketing platforms. Assessing the success of your marketing endeavors is critical, yet can be overwhelming. Demonstrating the significance of these efforts to your executive team is essential.

Regularly evaluating the performance of your marketing strategies is crucial, but as the marketing environment progresses, grasping the entire customer journey grows increasingly complex. The myriad of attribution models in existence only adds to this complexity.

While many B2B organizations rely on instincts and prior experience to shape their marketing decisions, it’s crucial to ask if you can accurately pinpoint the most successful campaigns, activities, and products without becoming mired in attribution models.

Given the multitude of marketing channels B2B organizations typically use—such as paid search, social media, email, and webinars—it’s essential to understand the various ways customers navigate through the purchase funnel. However, attempting to assign percentages to each engagement for attribution purposes can be counterproductive. Instead, it’s crucial to focus on the relative ROI of each touchpoint, recognizing their individual importance within the multi-touch process.

When it comes to attribution models, the key question isn’t whether you should have one—because even if you don’t choose, you have one. The better question to ask is whether you should be using a different model. Switching models introduces complexity, so there must be actionable insights to be gained from the new model.

As marketers, you shouldn’t feel compelled to assign arbitrary importance to each step in the customer journey. Each step plays a vital role, and although it’s crucial to measure and tie them to revenue, the process doesn’t need to be overly complicated. The good news is that you can reach the same conclusions more simply and without being a data scientist.

The ChannelMix approach focuses on marketing impact, which encompasses all marketing behaviors and activities regardless of their type or position in the customer journey. It highlights the influence each step has on actual sales results, allowing marketers to see 100% of the inputs that contribute to the bottom line. By not attempting to assign partial credit, you gain a holistic view of each journey’s stage and its role in driving sales.

This approach enables you to genuinely see the revenue generated from each channel and determine if those efforts are cost-effective. Additionally, it offers a more authentic picture of spend and revenue, rather than relying on complex measurements that only serve as intermediaries of actual results.

By understanding marketing impact, you’ll be in a better position to make valuable, data-driven decisions. It allows you to capture everything that matters to you—every customer touchpoint that contributes to your marketing success.