The Myth of Marketing Attribution

Transcript:

So let’s talk about B2B attribution for a second these days. Right. But I mean, everyone has their curves, right? First touch, last touch, declining, ascending, 18 touches to make a decision, right. So much noise, so much BS.

Like where do you stand on the whole. Like just all of marketing, loosen the pickle jar, and then like the one Instagram post it’s like pop, there we go. 

Most of the time when I see marketing teams trying to get attribution it’s because someone above them is asking for something ridiculous.

So if we educate the founder, the COO, the sometimes CMO even, or VP of sales and marketing, educate them on the reality of how many touch points it takes. For like these big ticket items, you know, a hundred thousand, $150,000 software package that takes six months to a year to close. You can’t track over that far.

Right? Like you can do your best. Obviously. They’ll see a bunch of LinkedIn posts from leadership. They’re going to see webinars. They’ll go to some conferences, downloads of eBooks. But the important thing is that they close at the end at some point, but I don’t want to waste my time trying to prove that I’m doing my job as a marketer, which comes back to KPIs. If the revenue is going up, I’m doing my job like as a CMO. Right. But if you want to fire me because, and I’ve seen this happen, founders get upset when organic traffic tanks.

Because Google just push another update or it’s a good thing. This is the problem. When people start getting too detailed in what the founder sees. I had a client very recently. I warned them and I said, hey, we’re going to make some changes. This is for the better. Your organic traffic is going to tank. Three months later, they called freaking out.

The founder’s pissed off. The organic traffic is way down. I said, great. We knew this was going to happen. Go look at your revenue. It was almost double because we got rid of the junk traffic and now it’s only high quality stuff coming in and it’s resonating more. Do you see what I mean? But if you try to, yeah.

I want to keep KPI’s and all that stuff high enough level, you can hire and fire on it. If I got fired, because organic traffic dipped, that’s a bad move because it worked, we got more revenue. I like it, it’s tricky. It’s very tricky because it’s all about expectation setting. And then the gentle reminder of I told you, so yes.