B2B Marketing Attribution: Why Aren’t My Leads Adding Up?

EP003 – Unscrambling Attribution – B2B Performance Marketing Podcast 

Louis Halton Davies: [00:00:00] You are always gonna be missing part of the story. The important part is knowing what your blind spots are.

Maelien Halton: It’s that famous quote was better, the devil you know that you don’t know that would fit the situation perfectly.

Louis Halton Davies: This is the B2B Performance Marketing Podcast by web marketer here to help you make the right moves with your B2B advertising. No spin, no smoke and mirrors, just honest insights from the advertising frontline.

Maelien Halton: Welcome back to the B2B Performance Marketing Podcast. I’m Maelien Halton from Web Marketer, Louis Halton Davies: And I’m Louis Halton Davies, also from Web Marketer.

Maelien Halton: If you’ve ever wondered why your CRM Google Analytics and your ads all show different lead counts from different lead sources, you are not alone. Today we’re gonna be tackling the confusing world of multichannel attribution. I know it’s a total nightmare to explain the numbers to stakeholders when they just don’t make any sense. So we are gonna be exploring why the numbers don’t add up and what you can do [00:01:00] about it.

Louis Halton Davies: Now, before we dive in fully, I want to talk through a bit of a mental model that we use with our clients. This is really gonna help to frame everything we’re talking about today. I like to split conversions out into two separate types. So the first one is direct conversions, and the second one is influenced conversions. So let’s start with direct conversions. These are what you’re gonna see in your CRM and in your Google Analytics.

Now direct conversions are usually under-reported because they only count that last touch before someone converts, and we know that there’s a whole journey before someone becomes a lead. And then influenced conversions are what you’re gonna see in the ad platforms themselves. Now, on the flip side, influenced conversions are typically over-reported because they count anyone who viewed or clicked on an ad, regardless of whether that ad was their last interaction. Or if they converted through a completely different channel.

Think of it like this. A [00:02:00] direct conversion only counts the session where a user became a lead and an influenced conversion counts every touch point along the way for each individual channel. Both are just as important as each other, but they tell us different things and they have completely different use cases. The only way that these conversion types would tell us a complete and perfect truth would be that if every single user learned about the business clicked on a piece of marketing, whether that’s organic social or an ad, or whatever, visited the website, became a lead, and did that all in one session.

As marketers, we know that that pretty much never happens, and there’s this big and complex journey that happens before.

Maelien Halton: Now that we’ve introduced the what, let’s run through the why. Here’s a whistle stop tour of each of the different data types that you could be reporting on and why we should be taking each with a pinch of salt. We are going to be talking about CRMs, Google Analytics, ad [00:03:00] platforms, third party attribution software, and user-reported data.

Now your CRM relies on last touch attribution, and that means it only measures the last step before someone became a lead, and essentially it ignores everything else that happened before this. Google Analytics uses data-driven attribution by default to say where the lead came from. This means it shows the single most influential traffic source that generated the lead. Ad platforms like Google and LinkedIn will claim everyone that engaged with ads before becoming a lead, whether that was the first step, the last step, or even somewhere in the middle.

These platforms can’t see what happened on other channels, and this means they’re not gonna be able to deduplicate any leads that also engaged somewhere else. Attribution software lets you choose the type of attribution model that you want to use. So how you want the leads to be attributed to each marketing channel, first touch, [00:04:00] last touch, linear, that kind of thing. It’s incredibly powerful. The downside here is it only starts measuring once someone hits your website. So yet again, we’re missing a chunk of that journey. User reported attribution. So usually this is a field in your form that asks, where did you hear about us from?

In reality, this is going to measure a mix of different attributions because it relies on A, what a user remembers, and B, their general digital marketing knowledge. So what was the last branded touchpoint that they remember interacting or engaging with? And will this be reported as Google or LinkedIn? Will it be reported as Google paid ads or LinkedIn paid ads? Or will they just not know or not remember and put something arbitrary.

So there’s really a lot to consider here when comparing the numbers. It’s almost as if you’ve got six different people trying to tell you the same story. They’re all going to be correct as far as they know, but different people are gonna include different bits of [00:05:00] detail or focus on different parts of the story. Just like these reports, they’re gonna be really insightful, but each of them is gonna measure a different part of the customer journey. And this is something that we really need to consider when we’re running through and crunching those numbers. Now it’s only human to instinctively trust numbers, but as we’ve said on other episodes, marketing data can be subjective, and that’s why we like to use the phrase data story.

Louis Halton Davies: So let’s try and put this into a bit of real world perspective with a hypothetical question. So something like, why are your ads reports showing me 50 leads this month when we’re only seeing 40 in our CRM? It’s a valid question, right? And it could very well be one that you’ve asked yourself before. The truth is that it can look a little bit shady, like someone’s maybe trying to pull the wool over your eyes. But let’s take a look at why this happens.

So we know that the CRM only takes last touch conversions into [00:06:00] consideration, and it doesn’t allow for the broader influence of other marketing channels. Then on the other hand, it creates this big disparity between the data and your ad accounts and your CRM. Now, it’s true you could just go and put attribution software in place and it will stop that double counting it’s what a lot of businesses do, and it’s a valid approach.

But I think we really need to understand the challenge. Before looking to a solution, ideally we want to go through the why and the how rather than jumping to the what too quickly, and that’s what we’re really trying to do with you today.

Maelien Halton: Unfortunately, that situation you just covered is one that happens all too often and it’s really important here to hammer home that perfect attribution just doesn’t exist. It’s also really unlikely that it ever will for a number of reasons. Customer journeys are really complex, especially in B2B. Google’s latest research shows that it takes 11 points across four different channels before someone ultimately converts. And as [00:07:00] we’ve already highlighted here, there’s not a single reporting platform that’s going to be able to cover all of that. And I think as marketers, we have to ask ourselves a really big question.

When we know that there are multiple touchpoints and multiple channels that we go through before becoming a lead, why are we so obsessed with finding the one touchpoint and the one channel that resulted in that lead? Why do we need that single source of truth?

Louis Halton Davies: It’s such a good question, and I also think that as marketers, we have this bias where when we’re presented with something clean and impressive versus something messy but effective, we’re gonna choose the pretty option every time. The problem here is we’re talking about the customer journey, which is extremely messy by default.

I mean, they call it the messy middle for a reason. It often feels like we naturally know that the customer journey and conversion attribution are part of the same thing in our day to day. But [00:08:00] then we kind of forget this when it comes to the reporting.

It’s like we have this tunnel vision where we’re looking at the bottom of the funnel and we’re treating that like the full picture. And that’s really my problem with attribution, or at least with how it’s used anyway.

Now our friends over at Funnelytics, they talk about this concept of contribution over attribution. And for me, that really hits the nail on the head. So let me talk about contribution for a minute, and I’ve gone a little abstract with this definition, but I promise there’s a point coming. If we think about Google Analytics, there’s really two top level scopes of data, which are users and sessions. One user can visit a website in multiple sessions from multiple traffic sources.

So when you think about it, when we’re talking about sessions or traffic, we are actually double counting users or individual people. Now that’s obviously fine, like the reporting wouldn’t work if we didn’t do that, but when we really think hard [00:09:00] about reporting on lead sources, we have to remember that it’s the individual that converts, not the traffic.

So rather than asking how many leads we got by traffic source, instead we should be thinking about which touch points contributed to each individual becoming a lead. We know that looking down the other end of the telescope and going user first with messaging is incredibly powerful. And it’s exactly the same with data. When we say attribution, we’re talking traffic, and then when we say contribution, really we’re thinking about the user.

Maelien Halton: Right? That got deep. So I think it’s a good moment to take a step back and zoom out a little bit. So I’m gonna run through what we’ve talked about as a bit of a helicopter view.

First up is the differences between CRM, your ad platforms, your Google Analytics, attribution software, and user reported data. Each system tells its own version of the truth, and that’s only based on the touch points that they can see. So we shouldn’t treat any one of them as the [00:10:00] complete version of the truth. Next up, we’ve got direct and influenced conversions.

Neither of them are perfect, but together they provide more of a holistic view, knowing that the truth is somewhere in between them. We talked about how as marketers, we know that these customer journeys are these big and messy things, but for some reason we’re obsessed with cutting them down into these simple, neat reports.

We ran through how attribution software simplifies this data story and why that’s both a positive and a negative thing. And then finally, we introduced the concept of contribution. Shifting the focus from lead volume by traffic source to touch points by user. So in the spirit of making this episode as useful as possible, let’s pull out some takeaways.

Don’t get hung up on your reports not matching from different platforms. They gather data differently and they measure different things. Remember that each report is a data story from the customer journey. Each one tells a different segment or a different part of the story. It’s never the whole [00:11:00] thing. Use your CRM data for lead quality, close rates and ROI. Use ad platform data to optimize campaigns. Know that one over reports and the other under reports. So the truth is somewhere in the middle. Get curious about contribution.

Start to think about touch points by user, not lead volume by traffic source. It’s much more difficult to measure, but the insights are so much more valuable. Present any insights as a story, not as a definitive truth. So rather than “paid ads generated 50 leads”, something like “up to 50 people engaged with ads before becoming a lead”.

I know that data is a really dense topic, but it’s often such a sticking point when it comes to talking about this with the board. If you can understand how your data is collected, you can paint a much clearer picture of your customer journey, which is one of the many riddles that you’ve got to solve for better performance marketing results.

Louis Halton Davies: And so let’s finish on what I think is a really important point. If [00:12:00] you are struggling with attribution, that’s only natural. Just is a struggle because there’s no perfect solutions and no complete truths. You have to report on it however is right for you. You are always gonna be missing part of the story. The important part is knowing what your blind spots are.

Maelien Halton: It’s that famous quote was better, the devil you know that you don’t know. That would fit this situation perfectly.

Louis Halton Davies: Now that’s it for this episode. If you found it useful, please leave us a review and let us know what your best takeaway was, and if there’s a topic you’d like us to cover in a future episode, we’d love to hear it. Just head to web marketer uk.com/topic and send us a message. We read every single one. Thanks so much for joining us today. Catch you on the next episode.