Influenced vs. Attributed: What Campaign Attribution Model Do You Use?

When it comes to associating opportunity revenue to your marketing efforts, one of the biggest questions is around the attribution model you choose. If you are leveraging Eloqua, you have quite a bit of flexibility around the model you want to use — but what one do you choose?

You ultimately have 2 choices:

• Influenced: In this scenario, you allocate the won opportunity amount evenly across all campaign responses up until the opportunity is closed/won.
• Attributed: In this scenario, you have a choice of allocating the won opportunity amount to the first campaign response, the last campaign response or a custom % allocation to all campaign responses up until the opportunity to closed/won.

The one thing I love about leveraging Eloqua Insight for this sort of reporting is that you get inherently get both metrics included in your Closed Loop Reporting reports. So if you have selected a specific attribution model, you will still get the metrics from an influenced model.

While it is great that you inherently get both metrics, when it comes to actually reporting on the success of your campaigns, you want to ensure that you are consistent with how you are providing them to your team and stakeholders (i.e. don’t flip flop back and forth quarter over quarter).

So what do you choose? In my opinion, there really isn’t a “perfect” choice per say, but there are a few things you can do to better understand how your campaign touches influence a customer entering into and going through a sales cycle:

1. Historical Data Is Your Best Friend: One of the best places to start is looking at past opportunities that your team has won and understanding how many campaign touches (and campaign types) took place up until an opportunity closed/won. A big thing to consider here is that within Eloqua, whatever attribution model you select will apply to ALL opportunities — I’m talking about new deals, renewals, and up-sells (this is assuming you are pulling in all opportunity types). So when you are looking back at closed/won opps, make sure that the type of opportunity you are reporting on is what you ultimately want to configure your attribution model against.
2. Lock In On A Decision: Once you have done your analysis, you need to stick with it. The last thing you want to be doing is changing your attribution model quarter after quarter and providing numbers that have different logic behind them. If you are unsure about which model to run with after your analysis, my recommendation is to run an influenced model (more on that below).
3. You Will Never Be 100% Accurate: So you have done all this work around finding the perfect attribution model, and then you got some guy (i.e. me) saying you won’t be 100% accurate. Think of it this way — your customers are engaging with your content outside of managed inbound and outbound campaigns. Not every touch point is going to result in a hand-raising activity, however, the awareness that is being created should help with educating your customer and ultimately helping influence their decision. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t go with a custom attribution model, just that you need to be realistic that it may not be 100% accurate.

There is no perfect solution here, but the more you understand your data, the better decisions you will be able to make around touch governance, what content types work at which stage of the buying cycle and ultimately which campaigns are having the largest impact on revenue.

Have you implemented a campaign attribution model in your organization? What was involved in your decision making process to get it up and running? Let me know in the comments below or feel free to reach out to me (mmacfarlane@couch-associates.com) to better understand how your campaigns are impacting your revenue!