If marketing attribution feels like a mystery to you.
You are not alone.
Let’s decode the terminology and learn about 2025 attribution trends.
In this episode of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning in to closing.
Time to show for go to market leaders.
I’m Alex Nazarevich, VP of growth marketing for Insightly and Unbounce.
Today I’m joined by Larry Todd, head of Leads Rx, a marketing
attribution platform.
Thanks for joining us, Larry.
Hey, Alex.
Great to be here.
So, Larry, when marketers get attribution right, it opens up a whole new world
in terms of finding efficiency with spend and understanding where to scale.
So why do so many marketers get it wrong?
Yeah. Great question.
This gets at the crux of most of the conversations
that I end up having with clients, which is the challenges
that bring them to look at attribution in the first place.
There’s so much information that is siloed
across the ad serving platforms today.
And the aggregation and arbitration of that data
is giving marketers headaches and nightmares.
So unifying that data, into a single place where you can take actionable
insights, is extremely difficult and it’s resource intensive.
And, most folks don’t have the tools in place to do that correctly today.
We see marketers getting attribution wrong when they try to take
a single touch approach to a way more complex customer journey.
Consumers are engaging brands, in a ton of different ways today.
And a lot of times, what you’re seeing when you’re measuring the effectiveness
of marketing campaigns is a single touch model, first touch, last touch,
and trying to assign credit to a marketing program
that fits that space in the customer journey.
When in fact, there was a layered, complex marketing approach
that oftentimes drives a long tail customer journey
through to a conversion that can span many different channels.
It can span many different devices and browsers
and can be, oftentimes over the span of days, weeks or months.
The second challenge is, even if you’re solving
for a part of that data puzzle and being able to unify information,
a lot of
times we see marketers measuring the wrong outcomes.
And what I mean by that is not getting down
to the most important business outcomes that a company cares about.
Most oftentimes, that’s revenue.
So if we’re optimizing to a trial sign up
or a demo signup or a content download,
or maybe even one single purchase,
a lot of times that’s not going to tell you
the whole customer story about the marketing programs
that are driving the acquisition of your most valued customers
and having the greatest impact on your most valuable business outcomes.
That’s great. Thanks, Larry.
So, what are some use cases where attribution really works well?
To dovetail off of the last point is the scenarios that bring
the most challenges are oftentimes the scenarios where attribution
can bring the most value.
That happens when there’s a lot of different marketing programs
that are driving consumers to take action.
There are oftentimes many different conversions
that happen in a longer-tail customer
journey through to an eventual bottom funnel conversion.
But look, the use cases for attribution are wide and varied, right?
Across B2B, B2C, direct to consumer.
There’s a huge use case for agencies to deploy attribution across their entire,
client roster broadcasters, publisher, partners.
It all just depends on what lens you are taking,
with attribution and what your end goal is.
Attribution can be effective across almost any of those use cases.
But the most value I see is a layered
marketing approach that spans multiple channels, and is driving a consumer
to take, some sort of digital action in path, to conversion.
Now, there can be offline marketing programs as well as online
and offline conversions, as well as online, but it’s really helpful
to have some sort of measurable response online,
to help anchor that customer journey too.
There are some instances that provide more of a challenge where
there is not a direct, measurable response.
And I think, you know, we think about consumer packaged goods.
So if you have a product that you are selling, strictly
through big box retailers and, measuring the sales of that particular product
and trying to tie that back to marketing campaigns is extremely difficult.
There are things like foot traffic you can measure.
But again, if I’m going into a Target or Walmart or another
big box store, right, I could be going in to buy a whole bunch of different things.
I may end up walking out with your product,
but there’s no way we can tie that purchase to an individual
and that individual back to marketing programs.
And so when I talk about that measurable outcome
or excuse me, that measurable, action, that is an important part,
to link a consumer
behavior back to a marketing program.
And how are newer channels like OTT
and streaming services showing up in attribution?
Yeah.
That’s, you know, we’ve seen an explosion in,
OTT, connected TV.
You know, podcast has been, popular for a while.
And is still gaining popularity.
You know, consumer behavior is changing, right?
There’s more avenues to reach our customer,
and there’s more avenues for our customer
to reach our brands and engage with our brands. OTT,
connected TV podcast
– folks are consuming video
and consuming audio in different ways than they have in the past.
Broadcast radio is absolutely fantastic for evangelizing the brand.
A lot of folks will take action
as a result of broadcast ad exposure or linear TV ad exposure,
but the the targeting that connected
TV and podcast brings is a lot
more of a one for one engagement closer to that of digital.
And so you’re getting the value that audio consumption
and, video consumption bring to the table.
But in a lot more of a targeted one for one messaging
as well as one for one digital action.
And so where you used to have to blast a message out to a whole DMA,
saying, take this particular call to action,
connected TV and podcast
allow you to evangelize that same message and measure,
their response in, in more deterministic
rather than probabilistic, model.
The knock on attribution is that it can often be tactical,
since it typically only focuses on one channel at a time.
This is impractical for marketers since they’re typically responsible
for multiple channels.
Often, you know, 4 to 10 of them.
So what would you say to someone if that’s what they had to say about attribution?
Leads RX approaches attribution
from a full-funnel, cross-channel perspective.
If attribution is leveraged correctly,
it should address the marketing mix
from a
full-funnel, cross-channel perspective.
When done right, attribution will be leveraged to give more
visibility cross-channel all the way through the funnel.
Marketers are never at a shortage of data, right?
The ad serving platforms do a fantastic job at giving you all of the data
that you need for that particular channel in a siloed, sort of fragmented way.
A lot of times that information is biased, right?
The ad serving platform has a vested interest in ensuring that
marketers maintain spend and potentially increase spend on those channels.
The proper use of multi-touch attribution
will bring an impartial, unbiased view
into the entire marketing mix the entire way through the funnel.
So whether it’s top, middle, or bottom of the funnel tactics,
multi-touch attribution will bring visibility
into all of those marketing touchpoints in a path to conversion.
If this is done correctly, the marketer has the ability to truly understand
what’s working well and what’s not working well within their marketing mix.
Where to put more dollars,
where to focus more attention, fail fast and pivot quickly.
If you have, dipped your toes in the water into a marketing program
that didn’t pan out too well right?
So when that holistic view is employed,
the right attribution tool, we’ll do a lot of that work for you.
So what are some trends in attribution that we can expect in 2025 and beyond?
Yeah.
I think consumer privacy has been
front and center for a while and will continue to be.
I think it’s a sort of a cat and mouse game between,
adtech and martech and some of the powers that be
that want to, take certain actions to protect consumer privacy.
And so that’s a battle that’s going to continue to rage.
There’s third party tracking capabilities that have started
to become less and less effective, less and less available to marketers.
There’s been discussion of third party cookies coming and going.
Google’s changed course on that for a long time,
but that consumer privacy discussion will continue to rage because there’s
a challenge in tying marketing tactics directly
to consumers in the absence of some of those tracking capabilities.
Now, some attribution solutions and measurement partners
have been on the forefront of the approach to that for quite some time
because the cookie deprecation conversation and a lot of the consumer
privacy regulation conversations have been happening for a while.
So what that is leading us to
and will continue to lead us to is more of a cookieless approach
to tracking consumer behavior cross-device, cross-browser and so on.
That will continue to gain steam and AI will start to play
more and more of a role in helping us
unify customer journeys and establish
anonymous, persona behavior online.
There has been a push and this is what I’ve touched on a few times
now in optimizing for revenue, revenue attribution,
bottom of the funnel business outcome attribution.
So instead of a lot of the proxy metrics looking at click through rates,
looking at conversion rates to a top of the funnel conversion point,
a demo request to trial, let’s follow that customer
journey all the way through and attribute to revenue.
Right?
Let’s tribute to the most impactful business outcomes,
that everybody cares about, not just the marketers.
And that revenue attribution puzzle is going to become more complex
and already has become quite complex with the introduction of of new channels
like I had talked about – OTT, podcast, connected TV, streaming audio,
but the unification of those channels into a centralized view
of the customer journey will only become more and more and more important,
and will be adopted at a wider scale moving through the year,
It’s hard to say the true effect that AI is going to have in 2025 and beyond.
And I think most folks can agree on that.
But AI is going to definitely help
with the unification of customer journeys and the identification
of different types of consumers.
But on the other side,. I think AI is going to start
to play more of a pivotal role in the outcome piece of attribution.
So taking actionable insights from the attribution analysis
and putting those back into work, into your marketing campaigns,
whether that’s helping you build out and deploy specific audiences,
automated bidding based on, you know, optimization,
within attribution, learning what’s truly working well and what’s not
and changing, up and down, spend in near real time,
based on those results.
So the optimization of the attribution modeling
in real time and the automation and optimization of output,
I think is going to be one big piece.
That’s great.
Larry, that was super informative.
Thank you so much for joining us today on Closing Time.
Yeah.. Thanks for having me, Alex. Appreciate it.
And thanks to all of you for tuning in.
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