Solving marketing attribution (using segment)

Update: Moved this publication to my own blog. Read the full publication here.

I have yet to meet the first marketer telling me they have solved marketing attribution. Sure, plenty of talks throwing around keywords such as multi touch attributionand numerous blog posts about how important marketing attribution is.

While everyone knows that prospects oftentimes need multiple touchpoints to get them to buy your product I’ve always felt that reporting on those different touchpoints hasn’t been solved yet. And I am not alone:

The ultimate solution

Here is a list of things that would help understand and improve our marketing campaigns when it comes to attribution:

• Seeing the different sources a visitor comes from
• Understanding which touchpoints contributed to a conversion.
• Look at more than just the last touchpoint that contributed to a conversion
• Link different sessions / multiple devices to a single user identifier
• Be able to rewrite history. PQLs that ultimately end up buying are worth more than other PQLs.

What’s so hard about this?

As a techie I never really saw this as a technical challenge. If you are already using segment you are sending the data somewhere allowing companies like hubspot, google analytics or other vendors to associate those pageviews to a user or account.

Existing solutions?

There are a the most important solutions out there that are trying to solving multi-touch marketing attribution:

• Google Analytics: First/Last touch models, Multi-Channel Funnels. I have been using GA for years but unsure if I should call myself an expert or a total noobie. Also i am trying to cut down on google products.
• Dreamdata (https://dreamdata.io/): Looks promising, demo only though, makes me feel it’s expeeensive.
• Attribution App (https://www.attributionapp.com/product/). Best name/desiption of what i am trying to solve. No pricing on the site and on the segment integration page there is no indication to how this works.
• RockerBox (https://www.rockerbox.com/). Nice marketing but looks like a different selling proposition. Also no pricing (which always makes me feel it’s super expensive) and no mention of segment integration on their site.

So there are companies offering solutions for this but they all were either too enterpricey (request a demo), too hard to explain how it works, filled with buzzwords (i really don’t need AI for this) or would not work with segment requiring you to load more trackers.

Looking at the segment integration catalog there is a list of software vendors in the attribution category but 80% of those are not solving marketing attribution.

An attempt at solving this

In the next posts (starting tomorrow), I will be writing about my attempt to leverage existing segment data and solve marketing attribution for us.

The overall idea is:

• less code is better
• do not want to touch the frontend code (loading more trackers)
• use reporting tools we already have (mixpanel, metabase/SQL)
• easy deployment (preferably not on our own infrastructure).
• work with segment (feed data back through identify() track() or group() calls
• data needs to flow back to any all segment.com enabled destinations

It’s an experiment to see how much code I need to write to solve this.

See you tomorrow!

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Update posts:

Day 1: The Plan
Day 2: Capturing and Storing segment events
Day 3: Analysing the Referrer (upcoming)