Top 5 Marketing Attribution Trends for 2019

By Ryan Koonce

Investor demands, customer expectations and competitive intensity will drive adoption of marketing attribution technologies and new attribution models.

Although classic web analytics and marketing automation tools serve up point KPIs, marketers are grappling with the lack true attribution insight to optimize their spending to revenue. According to a 2017 research study by the Marketing Attribution Think Tank (MATT), which was spearheaded by marketing leaders from some of the world’s top brands including Unilever, Allstate and Bank of America, while “81% of marketers use CTR (click-through rate) more than any other metric…there is virtually no relationship between click-through and sales.”

The good news is that marketers are finally recognizing the need to evolve their attribution approach. The days of last-click, first-touch and CTRs are fading into the annals of advertising, and a new day of multi-touch attribution models is gaining momentum, where MATT’s study also showed “75% of respondent marketers said they are or will be using multi-touch attribution within 18 months.”  Companies large and small are using these advanced analytics to patrol online (and offline) marketing touches and connect them to revenue. They can quickly tally campaign and advertising costs, allocate revenue credits and collect new insights to show marketers what’s really working, what needs watching, and what needs to go.

The rise of multi-touch attribution is just one example of change, one of our marketing attribution trends for 2019 with the potential to drive significant evolution and deliver economic opportunity over the next five years. Our CMO, Yancy Oshita, shared his perspectives on the adoption of multi-touch attribution and other pivotal trends in an article published by Martech Advisor: Top 5 Marketing Attribution Trends for 2019. Having successfully scaled marketing and grown revenue at venture-backed and some of the best-known tech brands, Yancy combines his experience and passion in a plain-speaking way to offer his insights and practical guidance to senior marketing leaders in B2B and B2C industries. In the article, he expands on the following movements:

1. Connecting Marketing to Revenue Outcomes
2. Rise of Multi-Touch Attribution
3. Performance Monitoring of Ad Vendors Comes of Age
4. Shift to a Marketing Attribution System of Record
5. Emerging Marketing Organizations and KPIs

As an advanced marketing attribution platform working with B2B and B2C clients, we’re always pushing ourselves to help marketers and advertisers use data to optimize their marketing to revenue. We believe the future will be characterized by smart attribution delivering increasingly insightful intelligence everywhere marketers connect with buyers. Still, most marketers are wrestling to act on attribution insights, indicating the challenge to take advantage of attribution intelligence goes beyond technology and includes process and culture. As Yancy predicts, next year we’ll see more companies tune their organization models and KPIs around the new insights offered by multi-touch attribution technologies.

Advanced marketing attribution is really about connecting marketing to revenue. It’s about bringing the science of marketing to a whole new level and organizations need to evolve with it to reap the enormous benefits. And unless CMOs are taking extreme ownership of revenue return on marketing, moving to advanced marketing attribution would likely lead to marginal success at best. As you grapple with “doing more with less” and “showing the money” to you’re your investors, the Top 5 Marketing Attribution Trends for 2019 in Martech Advisor is worth a read!