Attribution and Brand Awareness: Determining the Effects of Your Marketing Activities

We all know brand awareness matters a lot, but it is always difficult to attribute conversion value to our various marketing activities.

So how can brand awareness activities be accounted for? Online attribution tools do a great job of measuring online activities, but what about attribution with offline activities?  

To do this, marketers need to identify all regular marketing activities and then establish a baseline.  The baseline could be established using Google Insights for Search (as described above), if the brand generates sufficient search volume to show up.  Another way to do this might be through a lead tracking system as long as all leads are tracked in a single system that is readily queried.  While it’s probably best to track actual sales in determining a baseline, for some businesses the sales cycle is long, so establishing a baseline by using lead volume may be just as good a proxy and provide a more immediate data set.  Whatever the method, adjustments for seasonality should also be made if appropriate.  

Once a baseline is established, then the marketer should ensure that all activities (except those being tested) remain constant.  This includes minor changes like changing your target audience or adding a new media type. With a baseline established, marketing activities held constant, and a fully integrated attribution system in place, test campaigns can now be run to provide marketing insights.  When multiple media types are to be combined into a single campaign, the attribution system should understand how to allocate conversions to the media types both independently and together.

In the example graphed to the right, we illustrate a simple example of how a marketer might properly attribute conversions when adding a paid search campaign after establishing a baseline using lead volumes.  

Even though a search engine marketing campaign generated 150 out of 300 leads (an apparent 50% of the lead volume) in the test month versus a total of 200 leads in the baseline period, search engine marketing should only be attributed 100 leads (net increase in leads from baseline) or 33% of the value of the conversions in the test months.  

How could this be fair?  After all, the search campaign generated half the leads in the test period.  First, this is fair because month after month the business always generated approximately 200 leads (adjusted for seasonality).   Second, the search campaign may have captured the customer before she used some other source for attribution.  Because the prospect already was aware of the brand, had she not found the brand via search, she would otherwise have used another source to find the brand.  For example, a prospect could find a brand via a free, local business listing, as opposed to paid search.

If new marketing campaigns are to be continually tested, marketers need to clearly identify what baseline is before proceeding, noting that there may now be a “new” baseline.  If the search campaign above is terminated and replaced with something different, then the new baseline would remain the same.  If, however, a new campaign is layered upon it, then the new baseline would be 300.

As the number of marketing tools and channels increase, the more difficult it will be to attribute revenue and brand awareness to our activities.  How do you track your marketing activities?  Have you come up with any solutions to the problem of attribution?