Attribution Buyers Guide: A Roadmap for Change

If you’ve been reading our Attribution Buyers Guide series, by now, you’re not only a marketing attribution expert but you probably have a vision for how your company can add massive ROI and incremental profits to the bottom line. You may be ready to champion a major change in your organization, but as noted throughout this series, effecting organizational change with something as core to the company as media budgeting, measurement and optimization isn’t easy. Sacred cows abound.

Even organizations that have historically been analytics thought leaders find themselves challenged to evolve their companies’ measurement approaches. Inertia from old methods has become a trap for some. On the one hand, marketers know that they have to be masters of data-driven decision making. On the other hand, there are risks in relying on the wrong partner.

Oftentimes incumbent tools and processes have been used for many years are deeply ingrained in the culture.

While we believe that we have captured most key stakeholders’ concerns throughout the Attribution Buyers Guide series, every company is different, and stakeholder’s concerns can vary greatly. You’ll want to seek involvement and solicit input from key stakeholder groups early in the evaluation process. This makes it easier to guarantee that key selection criteria are agreed to and incorporated in the process.

Remember, as we have mentioned throughout the series, despite the benefits of a modern attribution solution key stakeholders may cling to the status quo. To be an effective advocate for better attribution, you’ll want to create a clear understanding of your team’s needs and concerns. Ultimately, this upfront work ensures strategic alignment with your company’s vision and will help you achieve the goal of improving your company’s marketing ROI.

Being an Effective Change Agent – Best Practices

• Start with vision of what marketing looks like in three to five years. This will help select solutions that can support getting your company to the future rather than chaining you to the past.

• Develop a project brief outlining the need, goals, and a plan for implementing an improved attribution system. You’ll want to highlight any potential upsides in marketing ROI or impact.

• Develop executive-level approval to embark on the evaluation process.

• Select an executive and non-executive champion to oversee the project and process; examples of good choices for the executive champion are CEO, CFO, CMO – and the COO and CRO may be candidates too; examples of good choices for non-executive champions are heads of Analytics, Marketing, or Media.

• Develop a cross-functional steering committee consisting of representatives from Analytics, Marketing, Finance, as well as Digital and Traditional media agencies; the steering committee should have a member of the team responsible for Profit & Loss. As a team, meet regularly to review progress and make decisions based on the agreed upon plan.

• As the non-executive champion you will review and filter candidates, identifying the top 2-3 solutions for the company based on your agreed to criteria and goals.

• The steering committee reviews top vendors identified in detail. The steering committee develops roles and responsibilities: who will manage the optimization decisions, what stakeholders will be needed for onboarding, who will be involved in QBRs with the vendor, etc?

What to Ask

1. Does the vendor include brand surveys and connect person-level survey results to person-level sales results? If not, they may be cheaper in cost, but the real cost will be an optimization that fails to properly value brand and hurts sales.

2. Ask to see the speed advantage through a live demonstration, reports from a live campaign, and documented case studies. Does the vendor use leading indicators of success?

3. Does the vendor use experimental design? (i.e. is success based on a transparent measure of “lift,” or an opaque algorithm that may be victim to correlation bias or other flaws?)

4. Does the vendor provide creative-level analysis that measures different creative at a person-level? If not, you may get a one-size fits all conclusion, instead of understanding which creatives work best for different audiences at different consideration stages.

5. Does the vendor incorporate external and location data such as proximity to store, weather, or gas prices? Depending on your vertical, these factors can be (very) important.

6. Does the vendor provide people-level measurement across all media channels (not just digital)? If not, your insights might be fuzzy and vague and not reflective of the user experience with your messaging.

7. Does the vendor own media, or have other economic incentives that may conflict with their measurement services?

As you evaluate your options, remember that the best of these new tools available answer questions such as the optimal reach and frequency within and between channels, and which messages are best for which audiences. Product advances are allowing even more granular insights in terms of message sequencing, and next-best message decisioning based on different audiences and different stages of their buying processes.

In this world of fragmented media and consumer attention, those who rely on data-driven decision making will find real competitive advantage in the marketplace. The process outlined in this installment of our Attribution Buyers Guide can give marketers access to tools that help them better understand their customer’s needs and intents. These insights, consistently applied to decision making, can lead to profound changes in your business.

Capabilities of today’s solutions generate insights in such a timely fashion that the nimblest marketers can incorporate those insights into live campaigns to drive massive performance improvements, rather than waiting for weeks or months to see results.

Following this plan should help attribution change agents better understand the attribution landscape within their company and provide a framework and criteria for evaluating potential new solutions.