How to do attribution with Segment
Understanding what activities and campaigns contribute to your company’s revenue and what, in lack of better words, is a waste of money, is critical for a business to know.
At Dreamdata we’re on a mission to build the world's best multi-touch attribution tool for multi-techstack businesses.
We’ll probably never get to a 100%, but what we are able to tell you is, in our humble opinion, as close to the truth as anybody can get you.
We need three ingredients to do so:
Your traffic drivers and the software tools you use
Information about your users behavior related to your business and your website
Data from your CRM and revenue software where you register your deals and revenue.
When we have all three ingredients the Dreamdata algorithm can then stitch the multitude of data together, remove redundancy and present an easily understandable, non-biased models for analysis and decision making.This further allow you to integrate your customer data ecosystem including rich tracking data for true behavior analysis and heuristic and algorithmic attribution models that handle multiple touches across many users.
Traffic drivers and software tools
Despite ever more tools and data available, the B2B buyer's journey is becoming ever more complex. Multiple people have a say. Multiple platforms, tools, media and touch points are used to impact decisions. Investors are shouting scale. Diminishing returns haunt your marketing spend. CAC vs. CLV is moving in the wrong direction.
Sounds familiar?
What actually drives your revenue?
Your CMO will give you one answer. Your sales guy another. And support will claim their stake as well. Oh yeah, and the product people are convinced it’s their new feature that works. All of them are probably partly right and partly wrong.
What you need to do go through your whole commercial organization and ask everybody which tools and software they use on a day to day basis. Where do marketing find traction, leads and automate mails from? Ie. Facebook and Google Ads, content marketing and search, active campaign, campaign monitor and so forth. Where do the sales department log revenue, activities, pipeline, calls etc.? Ie. Salesforce, Hubspot and Pipedrive. What tools do your support and customer success teams use to provide your customers with stellar help? Ie. Zendesk, Intercom etc.I think you get the point.
Everybody contributes to revenue. Not just one department. Each contribution needs fair attribution or you end up making wrong decisions.Wherever your customers have a touch point with your business you need to recognize it, note it down, forward the data to a database platform and have their fair share attributed to what made revenue happen.
You can either gather all this data in warehouse solution like Google Big Query or use Dreamdata.io.
Understanding your users behavior with Segment
One of the key ingredients in this attribution soup is how your customers are behaving from when they come to your website the very first time and all the time and touch points on their user journey until they end up buying your product or service.
Back in the day, you would think Google Analytics was enough for this, but the truth is that it comes up very short in today's very cluttered data and tool space
To get clarity on your users behaviour it’s very recommendable with a proper customer data infrastructure platform.
At Dreamdata, one of the partners, who we regularly recommend to companies who are serious about growth, is Segment.com.
With Segment you plugin all your customer data and clean, collect, and control it.
This means you can integrate all of your favorite tools and move their data to where it’s needed ie. send it to Google Big Query (a data warehouse) as one part of building your own analysis.
We recommend Segment because it’s state of the art for this and secondly, because we have already built an integration that with one click allows you to send your data through for further analysis.
If you are already using Segment, but are struggling with a few things, we are here to help you iron out the last details. We are Segment Certified partners and have been using it for years and seen most bugs, so in that respect, don’t hesitate to reach out.
Connecting the dots from anonymous user id to revenue in your CRM.
The last piece of the puzzle you need before you can start to do proper attribution is to understand how much revenue the person who came in as an anonymous ID ended up providing as a known customer of yours.
You do this by connecting data about raw ad and campaign performance with user behavior and revenue from the first purchase to life time value (LTV) contributed in your data warehouse. This is particularly important if you are a B2B Saas with target CAC set based on LTV.
Note: For this to work well, the importance of your sales team being disciplined about logging activities and representing true revenue numbers can not be emphasized enough.
When you have identified and gathered, cleaned and connected all your data inside the data warehouse, you are ready to build your own attribution models and analysis.
For most companies, it does not make sense to take a complex project like this on. We did it. It was hard, but we made it work.
We now know how to do it and that's why we decided to built Dreamdata to save you the hassle and complexity. Instead you can jump straight into easily understandable, non-biased attribution models for analysis and decision making. What’s not to like?
Where do you go from here?
Having set all this setup and connected you will need to strategically consider what attribution model(s) that you want to strategically drive your business after.
We will leave this for now and return to the topic in another post.
If you need help getting attribution right using Segment, please do reach out. We are experts and can help you become so as well.