Whoa! Can You Believe It? 39% of Marketers Don’t Know How Well Their Campaigns Are Working!

So, let’s talk about marketing attribution. It’s a pretty cool concept that can really benefit businesses. But, you know what? Sometimes mistakes happen that mess up our understanding of marketing outcomes. It’s like, oops! According to a survey by CallRail, about 39% of marketers don’t have a good grasp on how effective their campaigns are. Yikes!

Marketing these days is no joke. It’s gotten way more complicated and way bigger than ever before. Us marketers have to deal with so many choices, so many channels, and oh boy, so many customers! Attribution is a way for us to kind of guess how much money we’re spending on ads and how many conversions we’re getting in return. And you know what? That helps us figure out if our advertising campaigns are actually successful. Boom!

Usually, marketers use attribution data to plan future ad campaigns and assess the success of past campaigns. They do this by analyzing which ads had the biggest impact based on metrics like return on ad spend (ROAS) or cost per lead (CPL).

The survey shows that 96% of marketers believe attribution is crucial for making informed decisions and optimizing marketing strategies. However, as more marketing platforms emerge, it’s becoming difficult for marketers to determine which channels are truly effective.

About the Survey

The survey involved 300 marketers, including 75 who work in agencies serving multiple clients. CallRail also included the responses of 1,000 consumers from the United States. These consumers researched and purchased products and services across various industries.

I want to talk to you about a survey we conducted. You see, we wanted to find out what customers expect from a brand when they interact with it in different ways. It’s important to understand this because it helps us figure out what we need to do as marketers to meet those expectations and also identify the areas where we might be falling short.

In a press release about our survey, our Chief Revenue Officer, Mary Pat Donnellon, talks about something called attribution and its role in marketing. She explains that while some marketers have solutions in place to track certain touchpoints in the customer journey, very few have a comprehensive approach that covers everything. And that’s something we need to address.

Marketing Attribution Challenges

I want to talk to you about the challenges that marketers face when it comes to tracking and understanding the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. It’s important for us to be able to measure the impact of our online form submissions and email campaigns, but according to a recent survey, only 76% of marketers have actually configured attribution for online form submissions, and just 71% have set up attribution for emails.

But here’s the thing – it doesn’t stop there. There are other channels that we need to be looking at when it comes to attribution. And unfortunately, fewer marketers are paying attention to these channels. Only 64% have attribution for social media conversions, 57% for phone calls, and 56% for online chat. This means that there is a lot of valuable data that we’re missing out on, data that could help us improve the customer journey and make smarter marketing decisions.

And speaking of making smarter decisions, this survey also revealed that a whopping 81% of companies are wasting some of their marketing budget on tactics that just don’t work. This is a significant problem because it means that our resources are being misallocated, and we’re not getting the results we want.

So, what can we do about these challenges? How can we make sure that we’re effectively tracking and understanding the success of our marketing efforts? It’s clear that we need to prioritize attribution for all channels, not just online form submissions and email. We need to dig into the data that we’re collecting from social media, phone calls, and online chat, and use it to gain insights and improve our strategies.

Additionally, we need to take a hard look at our marketing tactics and make sure that we’re investing in activities that actually yield results. By reallocating our budget and resources to the strategies that work, we can ensure that our marketing efforts are both effective and efficient.

It’s time for us to step up our attribution game and make the most out of the data that’s available to us. By doing so, we can unlock new opportunities for growth and success in our marketing endeavors.

In the survey, they asked marketers about their use of attribution modeling. What they found is that many marketers already use it for some conversion points. But here’s the catch: more than a third of them don’t have attribution capabilities for social media. And to add to that, over half of the marketers say they don’t use phone call tracking tools. That means they don’t have a way to attribute conversions to these important channels. Instead, they’re stuck relying on data that might be inaccurate or incomplete when making decisions.

The Problem with Final Click Attribution

Let me tell you about this thing called final click attribution. It’s when marketers heavily rely on the last interaction a customer has before making a purchase. They focus only on that one step and ignore all the other touchpoints the customer had with the brand in the past. You can see how this might be a problem. It could lead to wrong or misleading decisions about where to invest marketing funds.

Let me give you an example. Imagine that Facebook takes credit for a sale, even though it was actually the result of a phone call or TV ad. This could make advertisers think that investing more money in Facebook ads is the way to go.

On the other hand, advertisers might use a different approach. They could give credit to the first interaction a customer has with a brand. For instance, a customer might find the brand through an organic search, then engage on social media, and finally make a purchase after clicking on a paid ad. In this case, the credit would go to the organic search. Mistakes like counting conversions twice can also give us the wrong idea.

Without Conversion Points, a Strong Attribution Model is Not Complete

Did you know that it’s super important for businesses to track their phone calls? Yeah, that’s right! According to a survey, phone calls are the most preferred method of communication for both low-value and high-value transactions. In fact, a whopping 91% of consumers trust a business more if they can easily reach a person on the phone. Pretty cool, huh?

But here’s the thing: only 57% of marketers actually have phone call tracking capabilities enabled. And without call tracking, these marketers could be missing out on some awesome opportunities to measure how well their campaigns are doing. That’s a big deal!

Oh, and here’s another interesting insight from the survey: customers really like quick responses. I mean, who doesn’t, right? A good 39% of people would actually give up on trying to contact a business if they take too long to respond after the initial contact. Time is money, after all!

The main problem causing difficulties in understanding marketing attribution lies in the fact that there are many different platforms that don’t work well together. These platforms may also use various models for attributing results, which can sometimes give contradictory explanations.