Three myths about attribution that could be hurting your repeat sales

So. You’ve built an audience of existing customers to target for an upcoming campaign. Great. Now the question is, where should you target them? Should you blanket every available marketing channel? Or will they respond best to Instagram ads? Email marketing? Text messages? A certain combination of those?

The best way to answer that question is with attribution.

Based on the data, what’s worked in the past with this audience? Which marketing channels deserve “credit” for driving these specific customers to purchase? Let’s identify that, and repeat it.

Attribution can be an easily misunderstood tool, partly because (until recently) it’s been so difficult to master. Here are three common myths about attribution — and how Clario is changing what’s possible:

Myth #1: Last-touch attribution is good enough.

Imagine an existing customer clicks from your Instagram ad directly to your new line of sketchbooks and hits “purchase”. Most brands would use last-touch attribution to credit that sale to a successful Instagram ad, and they’d base future decisions about how to market sketchbooks on that last touch.

You can see the problem.

It’s quite likely that your sketchbook customer had already visited your site to browse sketchbooks, or maybe they’d received your catalog in the mail, or they’d clicked off from an email promo earlier in the day before finally choosing to click the Instagram ad and purchase their sketchbook. Or, all of the above.

The only way to know accurately which marketing impacted your customer’s sketchbook purchase is to understand their entire journey, using multi-touch attribution (MTA). MTA will show you all the touchpoints a customer engaged with leading up to the purchase and will weight those touchpoints according to which were most influential.

Using MTA, you might realize that—for this particular customer—when it comes to sketchbook campaigns, an Instagram ad isn’t actually as effective as an email promo. Or you might learn that an Instagram ad without a catalog has a low chance of working. Without MTA, you might never have those insights, which is why relying on last-touch attribution can cost you sales. (And waste marketing budget.)

Myth #2: Multi-touch attribution is too expensive and too difficult to capture.

So why isn’t everyone using multi-touch attribution? Because tracking and assigning MTA at an audience-specific level requires either massive amounts of time and analysis, or an expertly coded machine-learning engine. Most CDPs don’t offer it, or, if they do, the price is exorbitant.

Clario’s “Custom Algorithmic Attribution” add-on, which is built on machine-learning, makes MTA accessible to any brand.

Clario is the first solution that enables you to quickly hone in on not just who to target for each audience and each campaign, but also where to target them. By analyzing data about which channels those specific customers have engaged with in the past for similar purchases, and applying machine learning to those insights, Clario turns MTA into your marketing superpower — so you can make every audience and every campaign more effective.

Myth #3: Multi-touch attribution should be used to make sweeping reallocations to your marketing budget.

Alright, so let’s say you learn that certain sketchbook customers respond better to email promotions than Instagram ads. Does that mean you should slash your Instagram budget?

That would be a mistake, and here’s why:

Clario’s multi-touch attribution shows how a specific audience of existing customers is likely to respond to a specific campaign. But you can’t use MTA to understand the value of the brand-building ads your potential new customers are seeing on Instagram. Maintaining upper-funnel visibility is critical, so using MTA to make wholesale cuts to your marketing budget can be a costly error.

Remember, Clario’s MTA insights are intended to drive repeat sales with your existing customers. These insights can be incredibly helpful at helping you micro-target specific budgets for specific campaigns, but they’re not intended to shape your overall awareness-building strategies.

Have you ever wished you knew which digital touchpoints would be most influential in a specific campaign for a specific audience? This is exactly what Clario is designed to do. Through the power of multi-touch attribution — powered by machine learning — Clario helps you reach the right customers with the right message in the right channel. Every time.