Understanding the complete picture of a customer’s journey is a pressing issue for all marketers. Marketers spend significant time and resources working on attribution models and metrics to understand how their visitors interact with their content and what converts them to customers. Marketing attribution is a method adopted by most enterprise marketers to track customers and the channels they come from. This strategy allows marketers to analyze and see the impact that their marketing strategy made on a specific goal, such as which channel influenced a purchase or sale. With these reports marketers can understand which marketing channels brought the most conversions & leads and ultimately which is the best place to invest marketing dollars.
There are many different types of attribution models. For example, last touch attribution assigns 100% credit to the final digital touchpoints (i.e.. clicks) that immediately lead to a sale or conversion. In contrast, the First-Touch attribution, the first time that a customer interacts with your company is deemed to be the single most important reason they ended up purchasing from you. Multi-touch attribution looks at all of the touchpoints on the consumer journey and assigns fractional credit to each so that a marketer can see how much influence each channel has on a sale. This allows marketers to optimize their content and strategy based on how visitors interact with the content.
The various attribution models have worked for years, as marketers were able to understand attribution and data of customer preferences by dropping third party cookies onto customer browsers and tracking them across the web. However, when users delete cookies, marketers are not able to get the full picture of where their visitors are coming from. With Google phasing out cookies, and the tech industry moving towards privacy-first solutions, marketers need to focus on solutions which provide all of their visitor data and attribution without the use of cookies.
The end of tracking for marketers through third-party cookies doesn’t mean the end of attribution. The best methods for tracking and attribution of your visitor’s data don’t require cookies to be effective. Decision makers in marketing departments should start taking steps on how to transform tracking and attribution with privacy-driven solutions only. Marketers should be considering solutions which will focus on first-party data.
Metricsflow’s cookieless attribution and analytics platform is able to provide this solution for B2B marketing teams. Available on the Salesforce® AppExchange, Metricsflow provides 100% of your visitor data (most companies lose roughly 40-70% through cookies!) and breaks this down into actionable, easy to understand insights right inside your CRM. Because our solution works cross-device and cross-platform, you’ll get to understand your full prospect and customer journey with multi-touch attribution. The move to a cookieless future may make some things more difficult, but it can also provide new solutions that will provide marketers with more data than they’ve ever had to work with before. Try Metricsflow today with a free demo and find out how you can seamlessly prepare for the cookieless future and a new method of attribution.