How Attribution Works in the Real World- Eric Stockton

Overview

Companies inevitably want to focus their efforts on the tactics that drive the most revenue. In this presentation, Eric Stockton talks about how to collect reliable data that will better guide marketers’ efforts. Behavioral drivers are difficult to track so marketers need to spend time finding out what drives purchases.

Speaker

Eric Stockton is the VP of Demand Generation at Constant Contact. He is an expert at creating revenue and driving pipeline for B2B, SaaS, and eCommerce companies. He specializes in growth, demand gen, publishing, and content.

Quotes

“Really, the marketing funnel is not as clean and clear as we would like it to be. And so we know that like intuitively as marketers, but we do use the funnel steps and we use the funnel stages in a way to be able to communicate with non-marketers, how things are flowing through from leads to revenue in the interest of trying to get things really simple. In a funnel format. We’ve maybe missed telling how buyers are actually buying today”

Key Points

  1. Data reveals flaws in attribution 
  1. Ask executives how they buy 
  1. Gather direct customer input about buying 

Transcript

1

Speaker 1

Hey everyone, really good to be back. This is I think our second session that we have done. Super excited to be with you. I’m also here joined by Todd Libo from Ascend to he runs a marketing research firm for Fortune 2000 brands that range from like Oracle and Dun and Bradstreet and Marketo and others. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to share with you some most recent research that’s really interesting to me, because this is actually my data one of the things that I have been doing recently, in my role as VP of demand for constant contact is to understand more about our own customers and really sort of trying to figure out from an attribution perspective, what’s lining up with my campaigns and how they’re driving deals, right, how they’re driving closed one opportunities into deals. And so this is all really born out of my own pet project with real data, and we’re going to share that with you. So I think we’re just going to jump right into it here to

2

Speaker 2

send to we’ve done hundreds of research studies around marketing, sales alignments, demand generation, nurturing, attribution, and I thought this dataset that you are sharing with us or shared with me to analyze was really a really a good way to kind of address you know, the broader topics that I know our research has kind of found, and I think this supports

1

Speaker 1

Really, the marketing funnel is not as clean and clear as we would like it to be. And so we know that like intuitively as marketers, but we do use the funnel steps and we use the funnel stages in a way to be able to communicate with non-marketers, how things are flowing through from leads to revenue in the interest of trying to get things really simple. In a funnel format. We’ve maybe missed telling how buyers are actually buying today

2

Speaker 2

Have probably been around for 100 It really has been around for 100 years as marketers

1

Speaker 1

We know that we know, our journeys. But we in order to communicate things that way that’s you know, that’s where the funnel is sort of, you know, started with awareness and consideration and etc. It doesn’t behave that way as we know, right? And we communicate it that way. But it doesn’t happen that way. We talked about conversion rate steps and everything else. It really behaves more like this. Right? People are moving in and out of various stages and various places on the site of awareness to consideration and back into awareness. Again, you know, you know what we do is we try to pigeonhole them into this kind of view. And I think lead it’s a better way to talk or tell the story to non-marketing executives, how things are actually happening and unfolding.

2

Speaker 2

There’s a study that was done a couple years ago by Google called the messy middle and it really kind of shows like what you see there below from the standpoint of on like a funnel, the starting point and the end point in between, as you know, this messy middle of different ways people have engaged I talked to

1

Speaker 1

Marketers every day that are leading marketing teams, or digital agencies. They serve teams and talk about this super cleanly, super clear. So we’re going to sort of dive into that. But in order to do that, I kind of wanted to just take a step back and explore how I have been tackling this myself. I run demand gen. For a team, that is the call to action is to get a demo or talk to a sales rep like many people that are listening to this. And so there’s obviously you know, there’s traffic, there’s, you know, on site, you know, behavior and visitors that are coming to the site and they’re checking us out, they’re going to the buying page or pricing page, or maybe they’re checking out a piece of content and they’re making their way to the demo request page when they are ready to talk to a sales rep. And you know, Mike, the real question underneath that was what was driving the person to come there in the first place.

2

Speaker 2

What Eric and his team did was they asked customers how they first heard about Sharp Spring. So as compared to looking at their analytics, they went out and they asked, they actually included it in their form as well. So that the demo form so that they could start gathering that information in real time as they move forward. But they went back and they asked these customers how they heard about it, and then compare that to what they were seeing in their analytics tool, and what the last click attribution was, and so you can see here the blue represents what the customer said, and the orange representative what the analytics was telling them the last click. And so you can see that there’s like this large disparity between most of these that are represented. And a couple things to point out was the, the one that had the most highest blue, which was what the customer said, This is how I heard about you, and this is you know, what got me started engaging with you was referrals. But if you looked at the analytics, you would say that it was one of the least represented. It’s a pretty shocking discovery because our money and our time is typically, you know, we follow the data, right? So since referrals and things that make referrals are not the things that our attribution model will show. We’re not going to push the time we’re not going to push the money and resources to that which is a big loss.

1

Speaker 1

If you’re a non-marketing executive who looked at this dataset and they looked at it they said, Hey, we want to do more of the things that are causing more of the sales stands to reason. But underneath that, if you peel back that one layer and you say, Okay, well, like we want to do more things that cause referrals, so what your natural tendency would be to do is, well, let’s go out and recreate this referral program that allows people to refer others to our brand and we can create brand affinity that way or we you know, we need to do more SEO or we need to do you know, more search the problem with that logic, if you don’t follow it all the way through, you end up going down these false start paths. And if you’re a marketer for any length of time, you sort of know you’ve been through this exercise before. You also know sort of how dangerous that can be, where you think you’re being data driven. But what’s in reality happening is you’re not sort of like overlaying what’s actually going on with buyer behavior that’s driving that outcome that you really want, which is closed one deals you don’t

2

Speaker 2

Here is the same data set that we saw before. But we, I think provided a bit more clarity, we put together some of the demand generation efforts, you know, so like webinars and different things that would be more traditional demand gen, outbound search, and then referral. So we kind of lump things together. So you can see with more clarity, you know, and you can you see here, just where like for example searches you know, a little you know, very much over probably overvalue from the standpoint of the attribution comparison. Not to say all these don’t have a place and a purpose. But as you look at it, just comparing what’s happening from the customer’s perspective and what they’re telling us versus the last click. It just starts to reveal, I think and provide a marketer with a little bit more clarity on strategy, efforts, and things of that nature.

1

Speaker 1

You want to ask the customer, why did they search for you in the first place? Right, it wasn’t because they went into Google and they type in your brand if they don’t know what your brand is, if you haven’t already solved or addressed some of those particular pain points that that person has that caused them to take the action to go into Google search bar and search and type it in. So Google gets the click, Google gets the credit. But in reality, what’s happening is, you know, something else drove that behavior. And so what’s typically driving behavior is going to be things that are hard to track. And, you know, is executives who are making budget decisions, that’s always a sticky thing as marketers, we want to be able to try to have clear attribution for basically everything so that we can report to our CFO or whomever that owns the owns the budget and saying like this is, this is our strategy for 2022 and here’s you know, here’s the budget that we need to allocate in these channels. And what ends up happening is you end up struggling with tying more of the things that are that are driving real revenue with closed one deals. With a richer, reconciling, the things are actually trying to closed one deals with marketing activities that that drive them So by and large, my own campaigns are going to show in like, you know, my attribution tool, it’s going to show me, you know, the things that are the things that are driving, clicks and driving traffic that are that are connecting to the form fields. That I get, or the demo requests I get, are going to be, you know, direct type. It’s going to be, you know, SEO related, right, organic search, from people doing the exact same thing. Landing on a piece of content and coming to the site or paid search branded terms where they’ve just they’ve you know, they search for us in Google and then they find us, but nowhere hardly does paid social show up and nowhere does word of mouth. Show up. Obviously, all of that stuff shows up as direct SEO, you know, paid search branded terms. And, and so, if you look at my core attribution, like, you know, and I did nothing else, I would say, Okay, well, I want to do more of these three things. And I would do less of the other things like have a podcast, you know, create, you know, conversations with people that are actually looking at referral programs, things like that. And, you know, creating content right and promoting content in places like paid social, and that and the like. So this, this is always going to be a challenge when we talk to executives because, you know, they want and frankly, you know, in a lot of ways I think have been trained to think I can I can I need to be able to see where my dollar rant goes in and my and my, my $2 goes out or comes out,

2

Speaker 2

And how do you speak to the CFO? With you know, and explain to them and you know, make your case, you know, that this strategy that you have is the right way to go? Because, like you said, they look at their numbers and, and yeah, and you don’t want to present yourself as non-analytical or not having the data to support what you buy, do.

1

Speaker 1

I actually do it in probably four different ways. The first thing I did is I actually set them up and asked them themselves, like how do you buy software? So it’s funny I actually had this conversation again, with someone different from a different person in finance on a finance team. And she said, well, the last thing I bought was TurboTax. And in TurboTax. I already knew it was what I wanted. I was like well take the step back before that. How did you know it was the thing you wanted? Oh, well, because I was on LinkedIn and I was in Jeetu. And I saw that it was rated really well. And then I was over here and I talked to a colleague in my Slack and they said this is like this is what we’re using. So this is what we’re going to continue to use and she recommended it. And I said well, okay, that conversation that and that process that you went through as a buyer is not unique to you. And so when you make it personal for the executive and you say look you know, this is the challenge that everybody is facing, not just you because this is how you do it. It becomes personal to them and becomes real. And so when you get into like the second, the second bullet, which is here’s all the data that I’ve collected from talking to and interviewing customers and talking with our sales team and talking to our support team. And I’ve sort of codified it and show it in a way that gives a very clear picture of how our buyers are buying. Right and so like where are they hearing about us? You know, collectively you know, and getting them in a place where mentally the exact the non-marketing executive is looking at and saying, Okay, this is actual data from people who are saying, you know, in interview or you’re saying that or in interviews that they’re telling you and I find that very compelling when you present it, you know, in a good way, very objective way. As this is just interview information that you know, we’re gathering, but it may not be enough, right? And so I take that third step which is really sort of what hooks people and that is talking about the zero party data, you know, gathering the information from customers who are actually telling us themselves, not what I pull out of it, of a conversation but what they themselves are telling us. That is really powerful, right? They tell us themselves in a way in the in the in the in the point at which they are taking action on our website. This is where I heard about you, right? And it’s just a simple form. It’s open ended, don’t close it like don’t make them drop downs or anything because you want to keep it open ended because you want to hear what they have to say in the way that they want to word it or voice it or say it and what they will tell you is they heard about you that they heard about you from a podcast they will tell you that they heard about you from you know word of mouth or referral they will tell you that they heard about you from a colleague, they will tell you that they came from you know a group or you know Facebook group or slack channel. I think that is super powerful when you tie that feedback from the customer and tell the story, the way that we just told it, where you say this is what the customers are telling us. This is what our attribution software is showing us. There’s a mismatch. What we really want is to be able to affect more of this stuff over here that’s causing people to come to us and dial those you know dial those things up that are there leading to more closed one deals,

2

Speaker 2

When you do have data to back what you’re doing is just a different type of data. Right? Great marketers are curious, right? They’re curious about why things work. And so they always ask that why question

1

Speaker 1

I would encourage anybody who’s listening to this to say that attribution is an incredibly useful, powerful tool, but in a lot of ways, I think should be used directionally as opposed to the single source of truth. And so when you talk to people when you when you do this sort of process, to be able to talk to again, non-marketing executives who really don’t understand the buyer behavior the way that you would as a marketer. This this is what gives you that leverage gives you that credibility to go and talk to the folks that might not see it as clearly as you do on a daily basis. All they see is money going in and you know, number of leads or number of deals coming out. And then the last thing that I would say and this is just my own personal usage because I use Sharp Spring as a I’m a customer of sharp spring as well as you know, working for sharp screen. I use something we call the life of the lead a lot. We’ve talked a lot about how no two buyer journeys are the same. And I think you know if you see from this graphic over here to the right, that’s sort of what’s happening is every touchpoint that a buyer has across their buyer journey before they come in and fill out a form or request a demo. There are multiple interactions that they are having with your brand. Some of them are on your site. Some of them are in various platforms like paid social or elsewhere, right some of them are in conversations and Slack channels and everywhere else. What we’re trying to do with the life of the lead, is capture that timeline of what’s happening from sort of ad impression all the way through to, you know a click to the site to did they download a piece of content or just view a piece of content that you have all the way to, you know, did they come through and you know, you know, fill out a form to get an eBook or did they, you know, interact with you on their chat or through chat with a sales rep. They didn’t call anybody but they’re sort of doing their buyer due diligence, you know, for the your product or your service and they you know, they have multiple touchpoints right they’re seeing ads like you know, they click through on a retargeting ad you want to see all of that in a way that really captures the entire, what we call the life of the lead, which is the interaction points across that buyer journey. And as we talked about, there’s, you know, in this graphic that I’m showing you there’s never going to be another one that looks exactly like this one. They’re always different. And what it’s taught me is it showed me a way to validate what I’m hearing from customers or what I think I’m hearing from customers. And it’s showing me a way that actually people are interacting with my brand, so that I can create marketing campaigns that really get buyers or potential buyers to do more of those things. Right. And so that’s what I’m after is trying to get more insights and more behavioral data so that I can understand how to connect all the dots in that messy middle, like you were saying earlier.

2

Speaker 2

That’s a great tool and really provides a lot of clarity that we need as marketers.

Speaker 1

There’s a lot of data that we sort of focus on, there’s more to come be on the lookout for those in the next month, month or two.

1

Speaker 1

Thanks for joining us. I appreciate it. And thanks for helping walk us all through it.

2

Speaker 2

You’re welcome. Have a great day.