What is Revenue attribution?
Revenue attribution is the process of crediting a conversion or sale to a specific channel or marketing action. The most basic example of this is a promotional email that directly led to a web purchase. The attribution is pretty clear: the customer received the email, clicked on the link, and purchased the item. Therefore, the revenue for this sale—and other sales like it—is accredited to this specific email campaign.
Revenue attribution allows marketers to reliably identify which campaigns are the source of incoming business revenue. However, many marketers today are still not using revenue attribution to its full capabilities. Staying in the dark about your revenue attribution creates missed opportunities that could have otherwise provided businesses efficiency and revenue funnel improvements.
Revenue attribution is key to accurately measuring and reporting campaign performance. It gives CMOs hard numbers with which they can prove marketing ROI.
Revenue attribution models: who gets credit for a sale?
Marketers have many marketing channels active at the same time and oftentimes customers will encounter multiple marketing channels over the course of their purchase. So how do you measure which one gets credit for the sale?
There are different attribution models in place, each with their own advantages and disadvantages:
First-touch revenue attribution.
This model gives credit to the first touch point a customer encounters. It assumes that the first touch point is what makes the customer aware of your brand and is what starts them down the path to the sale. The problem with this method is that it can overemphasize how important the awareness stage of the funnel is. It’s also susceptible to errors, since the true “first-touch” could have been offline or otherwise untrackable, such as word of mouth referrals.
Last-touch revenue attribution.
The last-touch model credits the sale to the last recorded touch point. It’s the simplest revenue attribution model to measure by far, and is what many attribution tools default to. Much like the First-Touch Revenue Attribution model, revenue using the Last-Touch Revenue Attribution model can also easily be attributed to inaccurate sources. For example, if a customer encounters your booth at a tradeshow and then goes to your website to complete their purchase, it’s the website that gets the credit for the sale - even though the tradeshow had the most influence on the customer for initiating a sale.
Multi-touch revenue attribution.
This revenue attribution model keeps track of every touch point the customer encounters over the course of the buying cycle and gives credit to each stage of the sales process. The amount of credit for each touch point varies based on whatever variant of multi-touch attribution you decide on using giving you full control over quantifying the credit for a sale. Plus, it’s potentially more accurate than the other two methods as it offers a greater insight as to which marketing assets are influencing the overall buying decision as well as how often each asset manages to influence sales across your product line.
The missing link in revenue attribution: what other marketers don’t know;
Most of the methods listed above require some sort of online or digital component in order to capture the required data. Retreaver offers tools to support real time tracking for your websites, landing pages, forms and online advertisements - allowing marketers the ability to track leads from initiation to complete sale and everything in between giving you the multi-touch attribution model that best describes your customers sales journey.
Retreaver has the capability to monitor all of your marketing channels seamlessly by combining your valuable data in one place. Modern call tracking solutions like Retreaver generate unique phone numbers that you assign to both digital and offline campaigns, and tie them into your marketing automation system. You can then gather an accurate picture of your actual campaign performance, and your agent doesn’t have to risk wasting your customer’s time asking intrusive questions about their sales journey.
View our Understanding Caller Journeys Through Call Tracking article to learn more about how you can utilize the power of call tracking with Retreaver to gather customer sales journey's for use in your multi-touch revenue attribution models.
Accurately Attribute Your Call Revenue Through Call Tracking
Contact our sales team for an online demonstration, The Retreaver platform will provide you with all the resources you need to optimize your advertising outreach, maximize sales results and provide excellent customer service over the phone!