Finding the original source: from single-touch to multi-touch attribution
Most, if not to say all users of CRM systems have encountered and made use of an “original source” field. This is where the CRM tool indicates the source/origin of a given customer. Or to put it another way, where the CRM attributes credit to the lead’s first-touch.
While this single-touch attribution approach offers revenue leaders a glimpse into what touchpoints might be converting leads, it paints only a fragment of the overall picture.
Intro: original source of revenue
In a world of multiple touches and multiple stakeholders, the benefits of single-touch attribution are limited to businesses early on in the B2B growth cycle. As ambitions grow, so too does the need to take into account the wider array of touches.
Without this, vital questions such as what campaigns and activities are working, how long the average buyer journey is, and what lead-conversions are most valuable, cannot begin to be answered.
In this post we’re going to try and lift the lid on the limitations of single-touch attribution for B2B growth needs. As well as set out the inherent business value going from single-touch to multi-touch attribution.
Here’s what we’re covering:
The original source: single-touch attribution by default
Single-touch, single source attribution: the limits
Incomplete customer journey
Single-touch attribution on inaccurate data
Multi-touch attribution for B2B growth
Getting the complete customer journey
Creating business value
Bringing down the silos: marketing and sales in one
Concluding remarks (TL;DR)
The original source: single-touch attribution by default
The original source, which is also known as the “lead” or “primary” source, is a field within CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, that identifies the origin of a given customer. In other words, it shows where the customer started her journey.
The source can either be identified automatically from the CRM’s on-site user tracking, or introduced manually by the user.
Hubspot defines the original source’s parameters as follows:
“the Original source property will be updated to reflect the source of the contact's earliest visit to your site.”
The definition reveals three important elements:
Single-touch: it takes into account the impact of just one touch.
First-touch: it places all value for the conversion to the “earliest visit”.
Single source: it factors in just one source.
This trilogy can work perfectly well to meet certain requirements, for instance assessing the overall contribution of marketing on closed deals. As Shannon Dougall, VP Marketing at Tugboat, recently explained to us at Dreamdata, this is the setup she uses to successfully attribute her team’s contribution to revenue generation. For a new CRM article check this out.
"The first thing I do when setting up a revenue marketing process is set a marketing contributed quota for the marketing team."
While working perfectly for this purpose, the setup might fall short when having pinpoint all the activities that contributed to revenue. This is because the three elements listed above only carve out only a narrow picture of everything that’s taking place in the customer journey prior to entering the CRM as an SQL.
Additionally, the process as a whole reinforces the siloing of marketing and sales. With the marketing lead generation happening independently of the sales process. A setup which is especially unadvisable for those businesses running ABM campaigns. See why here.
If used as the only form of attribution, this single-touch, single source attribution can leave marketers with insufficient information for understanding how their wider activities are impacting the customer journey.
When having to repeat and scale successful campaigns to fuel growth, this limited overview can prove to be a significant roadblock.
Let’s dig a little deeper.
Single-touch, single source attribution: the limits
The B2B customer journey is characteristically long and complex; with multiple touchpoints and stakeholders in deals that can span months.
What’s more, according to this research:
“[B2B SaaS] buyers are completing a little over 60% of the buying process before engaging a vendor”.
Meaning that relying on a CRM’s “original source” field to describe the initial stage of the already complex B2B buyer journey, can only ever deliver but a fraction of what’s actually taking place.
The consequences of this are not insignificant, especially to a B2B in growth mode.
There are two limitations in particular that stand out: (1) not capturing data on all the touches, (2) the challenge of attributing towards an inaccurate dataset.
Let’s use a hypothetical example to help us understand these limitations a little clearer.
Example scenario:
A customer reads a blog post promoted on Linkedin which resonates with a problem her team is facing.
She shares the post with her team and an internal conversation takes place. Yet nothing is actioned.
A few weeks pass and one of her colleagues clicks through a google display ad on your product. Browses the site, takes note, and emails these to the Team Lead.
The Team Lead goes onto the site organically, browses some pages, and books a demo.
The demo call takes place. After which the Team Lead makes the case for the tool to her leadership.
No budget is available for the next three months. The customer goes quiet throughout the period.
A retargeting ad is clicked through by a third team member which then re-initiates the process, with sales and customer success engaging in a number of calls.
The deal is closed a month later.
Incomplete customer journey
Using a single source methodology, where just one source is tracked means potentially not capturing the entirety of the customer (account) journey.
And without taking them all into account as a holistic customer journey, it’s impossible to know what your ROAS, ROI or LTV is on all your ads, campaigns and activities. Which in turn means it is impossible to start making data-driven decisions on what’s working and what isn’t.
In an attempt to fill in some of the gaps, marketing teams might resort to using the attribution offered by their ad platforms, such as Google Analytics or Facebook ads.
While these platforms offer some clarity, they are also limited in what they can offer the B2B marketer looking to scale. This is mainly due to these platforms being guided towards the linear and single buyer B2C customer journey.
The B2B journey has three distinguishing features:
The multiplicity of touchpoints.
The customer is not a single individual but an account (company), where a host of employees are typically involved in the buying journey - as per the example scenario above.
The deal is closed by a team effort spanning marketing, sales, and even customer success teams.
If you select a tool that is exclusively, or even partly, focused on B2C attribution, it is very likely the tool will not be capturing and accounting for important data.
So even here, B2B marketers and growth leaders are left with gaps in their customer journeys.
Learn how to select the right B2B attribution tool for you here.
Attribution on inaccurate data
The example scenario raises a flurry of questions on what the original source is. Which campaign was it that helped close the deal? Was it the retargeting, or the Linkedin blog promotion? Was it the demo call, the google display ad or the customer success calls?
Well, it may have been any one of these, or all of them.
Without taking all of them into account there is the risk you do not have the complete picture and as such cannot accurately run your attribution.
Let’s take a look at what can happen when you apply a single touch attribution model, like First-touch, to an incomplete customer journey.
Let’s use the example scenario set out above.
Say your Hubspot on-site tracking picks up (3) as the original source. The original source field will be populated with “Paid Search - Campaign [name]”.
The other activities will not be credited with impacting the conversion.
Now, say this happens across 10 customers.
Come the time to really fire up growth, where you have to repeat successes in scale, you go to your CRM and see that 10 of your customers were converted by the Google Display Ad campaign. So you scale this campaign.
The reality might be that the initial Linkedin content promotion was in fact having a greater impact on acquiring your leads and bringing revenue.
This once again reinforces the central thesis of the article. The ability to pinpoint what campaigns and activities were contributing to revenue, and scaling them, is central to driving growth. Scale the wrong campaigns, and not only will you waste the spend, but growth could flatline.
Multi-touch attribution for B2B growth
It’s clear that single-touch, single source attribution leaves critical gaps in the B2B customer journey. Stopgap tools such as Google Analytics offer some relief. But these too are limited for the B2B user.
Left unaccounted for, these gaps keep marketers and growth leaders in the dark as to the impact of their activities.
But how can a business realistically allocate credit to deals when there isn’t a complete, connected and transparent overview of customer journeys?
They can’t. To fill these gaps, B2B marketers and growth leaders need to be factoring in all the touch points by all the stakeholders within the accounts. In other words, they need to be looking at doing multi-touch attribution across the entire buyer journey. For this reason, as we’ll see below, the label ‘revenue attribution’ more adequately defines the process.
Getting the complete customer journey
The central element of multi-touch attribution is taking into account every one of the touches that happen across the customer journey.
If we take the example scenario above, multi-touch attribution allows marketers to see the impact of all the events that took place across all channels, and not just the arbitrary ‘original source’ selected by the CRM. See more about multi-channel attribution here.
By offering a holistic picture of B2B’s long and complex customer journeys, multi-touch attribution ensures data-driven marketers can do attribution across the pipeline, learn the LTV of ads, measure content ROI, benchmark growth, predict revenue, and plan what efforts to scale next.
How does it do this?
A multi-touch attribution approach, will start by consolidating all the revenue-related data into one place. That means data from on-site tracking as well as from across your ecosystem - CRM, ad platforms, automation tools, etc.
Once this is all merged and cleaned - to make sure there’s no duplication or empty values - the data is run through attribution modelling.
Ideally there should be multiple models in place as you want to be able to apply more than one model to the pipeline. This will allow you to compare how certain activities are performing at different stages.
For example, First-touch will reveal how your paid campaigns are performing in generating leads which convert to closed-as-won deals. Linear, will reveal how activities across the pipeline have performed.
See here for more on B2B attribution models.
An off-the-shelf multi-touch attribution platform like Dreamdata will handle the complete process, from gathering and cleaning the data to offering any attribution modeling the meets your business needs.
Understanding the business value
While the pain of not having a complete, transparent and detailed picture of the customer journey is felt most intensely in marketing departments, there are critical business-wide pain-points which multi-touch attribution helps overcome.
Unfortunately, this wider business value is too often overlooked when the case for multi-touch attribution is being made - especially internally.
In fact, most marketers and growth professionals are already familiar with the benefits, but are unable to translate these into high level value for the company.
Part of the fault lies in the oft-cited definitions of attribution. Take these two examples, where attribution is defined as:
“[understanding] the means by which the customer came to know and buy your product or service” (Salesforce).
“a reporting strategy that allows marketers and sales teams to see the impact that marketers made on a specific goal, usually a purchase or sale.” (Hubspot)
While they are technically accurate, insofar as they spell out what attribution does, they omit, frustratingly, the business value attribution brings. This is why ‘revenue attribution’ has become the preferred label across tool providers.
Here are some examples of business pain points which we at Dreamdata have seen our customers overcome through their multi-touch attribution.
Inability to scale
Mentioned throughout this piece, the ability to scale what works is the core component of any growth journey. Through multi-touch attribution, marketers are able to pinpoint which campaigns and activities are performing and which ones aren’t.
Which means that when the c-suite presses for growth, marketers can turn on the taps across all the best performing activities in the pipeline.
Inaccurate forecasting
Without a complete picture of what’s working, the task of forecasting is bound to suffer from inaccuracy. As the core elements of the average customer journey become clearer, and performance of each revenue-generating activity is better understood, forecasting becomes more accurate.
Missed revenue goals
Persistently missing revenue goals can stem from two factors:
Revenue-generating activities are not performing.
The goals that have been set are not aligned with the data of what is realistically attainable. In other words, the data behind setting the goals is inaccurate.
Both of these are symptoms of an incomplete data set of what is happening as customers are making their way through the buying cycle.
By fully mapping the customer journey and attributing revenue back all the activities being run, the data for setting revenue goals is much richer. Meaning setting and attaining these goals becomes viable.
Declining/suboptimal ROI
A declining ROI is typically the result of weak performance on your activities or an attempt to scale activities which aren’t impacting revenue.
However, this analysis is dependent on how accurately you’re measuring and attributing revenue on your activities.
Without a complete picture of how all campaigns and activities are impacting revenue, it will be difficult to accurately measure and then improve ROI.
Bringing down the silos: marketing and sales in one
As mentioned above, the single-touch, single source attribution models serve to reinforce the marketing and sales silos.
These silos however don’t really represent the nature of the B2B deal which is closed by a team effort involving marketing, sales and customer success.
Too many organisations remain entrenched in a “binary” way of thinking, where only some activities get credit for closing a deal.
With multi-touch attribution the opposite is true. As can be seen from the above, multi-touch attribution helps B2Bs move away from these silos (and thus binary thinking) by offering a holistic view of the customer journey - with all the touches.
Once this clarity exists, the binary decision making becomes redundant. With every touchpoint revealed, proper attribution can be applied across the entire pipeline - without prejudice!
For more on sales and marketing alignment look here.
Concluding Remarks (TL;DR)
There are many B2B companies relying on their CRM system’s “original source” field to attribute towards the lead’s first-touch.
While this might offer revenue leaders a glimpse into what touchpoints might be converting leads, it paints only a fragment of the overall picture. This is for three main reasons:
Single-touch: it takes into account the impact of just one touch.
First-touch: it places all value for the conversion to the earliest visit.
Single source: it factors in just one source.
Combined, these three elements carve out only a narrow picture of everything that’s taking place in the customer journey prior to entering the CRM as an SQL. Stopgap tools such as Google Analytics offer some relief. But these too are limited for the B2B user.
To fill these gaps, B2B marketers and growth leaders need to be factoring in all the touch points by all the stakeholders within the accounts. In other words, they need to be looking at doing multi-touch attribution across the entire buyer journey.
With multi-touch attribution, marketers and growth leaders are able to complete customer journeys, inclusive of all the touches and stakeholders. This allows them to create real business value, through scaling, helping reach revenue goals, predict revenue, and bringing down the marketing and sales in one.
Here’s an extract of how a Dreamdata customer, Gorgias, saw the need to transition from their CRM’s single-touch to multi-touch revenue attribution:
“All teams generate data across distinct channels, e.g. advertisements, outbounds for Growth Marketing, agency partners, app partners for Business Development, etc.”
Until recently, any deal closed in these channels was attributed to a single source only, following a prioritization process defined in Hull.
Once this was no longer scaleable or lived up to their main KPI of data accuracy, the Growth Ops Team knew it was time to look for a multi-touch attribution tool.
The more they grew, the more issues they encountered with their single-touch attribution model as, throughout the customer journey, many significant touchpoints can happen, from several channels and sourcing teams.”
See the full success story, here.
