Guide to B2B marketing attribution—what, why, how & when

Attribution is challenging for companies of all shapes and sizes—yet even moreso for B2B businesses with the added complexity of long sales cycles, multiple buyers, dozens of online and offline channels and interactions, sellers who don’t log (or credit) activities correctly in your CRM, etc.

Yet despite these challenges, it is critical that you can tie revenue back to your marketing investments and efforts.

What is marketing attribution?

Marketing attribution is a system of tracking which touchpoints, defined as any single interaction with a prospect, led to a conversion event. Then assigning a value to all or some of the touchpoints within the journey to measure its impact and value.

The benefits of marketing attribution (aka why it matters)

Marketing attribution provides real-world data that demonstrates the efficacy and efficiency of your marketing campaigns, channels, and programs. It also generates valuable insights about the customer journey that can be leveraged to improve, accelerate, and predict positive outcomes. Marketing attribution done well can help you:

• Measure and report on the efficacy and ROI of your marketing efforts
• Re-allocate limited resources to the highest-converting channels and programs to sustainably fuel growth and improve ROI
• Align marketing and sales to a single source of truth for measuring and reporting on pipeline contribution
• Make an effective business case for incremental marketing investments such as budget, headcount, and/or agency resources
• Improve the accuracy of your forecasting by providing historical data and benchmarks

Finally (and selfishly), current and future employers will expect that you can speak to the business impact of your efforts. Marketing leaders that can, will see their careers (and salaries) climb. While those that cannot, may stall professionally and/or see their budgets and teams shrink. This is especially true in a shrinking economy or business.

How to choose the best B2B attribution model for your business

The model you select depends on your business model and your typical customer journey. Rarely does a B2B customer go straight to a website or a salesperson to make a purchase. Consider these following statistics about the B2B customer journey:

• Unlike B2C, the “customer” in B2B is a group of people. B2B purchases typically include 6-10 decision makers (Gartner)
• Software purchases takes an average of 15+ months from evaluation to purchase (Gartner)
• It takes an average of 8 touchpoints just to acquire a lead; the number of touchpoints required to close a sale depends on the complexity and price of your product or service
• The total number of touchpoints required to make a sale are evenly split between pre-sales (53%) and sales (47%) (Brightfunnel)
• B2B buyers who interact with multiple channels spend more than those who only purchase after engaging with a single channel (McKinsey)

6 most common B2B attribution models

Single touch attribution models

1. First touch attribution: Only the first touchpoint receives any credit.
2. Last touch attribution: Only the last touchpoint before conversion receives any credit.

Multi-touch attribution models

3. U-shaped attribution: The first and last touch are weighted more heavily (eg, 25% credit each), then the remaining credit (eg, 50%) is distributed evenly to the touchpoints that occurred in the middle.
4. Linear attribution: Every touchpoint in the conversion path shares equal credit. Companies can assign one point per touch or divide the total touches by one. In the latter, an opportunity with 20 touches would assign 0.5 credit to each touchpoint.
5. First & last touch attribution: Only the first and last touchpoint receives credit. They may receive equal credit 50/50 or you may choose to weight one more heavily than the other.
6. Time decay attribution: Every touchpoint receives some credit, but those closest in time to the sale or conversion get most of the credit.

Single-touch attribution models are best suited for B2C / D2C products where a sale or conversion happens in a short period of time or includes limited touchpoints. Its benefit is it’s simplicity, but for B2B businesses, single-touch attribution models fail to appreciate the complexity of the B2B buyer journey and are not able to measure which touchpoints were most influential in driving a sale.

4 steps to successfully implement B2B attribution

1. Document the project plan including goals, milestones, due dates, and key stakeholders. Meet regularly to review progress and troubleshoot roadblocks.
2. Select the attribution model that fits your business model and goals
3. Implement the necessary infrastructure and processes to capture the required data. Businesses with legacy or disjointed systems will need to first modernize and integrate their systems.
4. Report, validate & iterate

When should I invest in marketing attribution?

Short answer: now.

Longer answer: implementing and managing attribution models is resource intensive, both, in time and expense. Despite the upfront investment, however, the earlier the better. Future forecasting is dependent on both current and historical performance. The longer you delay tracking attribution, the less historical data you will have on-hand to inform your strategy which can prove costly and detrimental over the long term.