Study Shows Focus On Last Touch Attribution Skewing Impact Of Multichannel Campaigns

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Written by John Gaffney

Tuesday, 07 April 2009 13:25

Not all the best leads are generated from outbound campaigns. In addition to email campaigns, trade shows, and virtual events that produce raw inquiries, a new study shows an increasing number of prospects are engaged from inbound website visits and organic search, and unfortunately are untracked.

According to the new study “Unlocking the B2B Analytics Black Box” from Business.com, over 93% of BtoB marketers cannot see the influence that multiple online campaigns/keywords have on conversions, And because they have no metrics on which to rely, there is a danger of optimizing online marketing campaigns into decreased performance, not better.

“Companies are spending money on paid search in the hope of generating leads and then they lack the ability to see what their efforts really mean,” says Ben Hanna, VP of Marketing for Business.com, which researched 27,000 BtoB websites as part of the study. “Customers are coming to websites driven by these campaigns, they go to just a few pages, or they go deeply into the website, but it all goes unmeasured and therefore unacted on.”

Hanna says the study shows a continued misinterpretation of the importance of the concept of “last click attribution.” Many BtoC as well as BtoB marketers have stressed the last click as the ultimate action and result of online marketing. However, research led by Microsoft’s Atlas Institute shows that last click attribution may be overrated.

The Business.com study shows the most popular programs only show the impact of the “last click” preceding a purchase or other conversion, leaving marketers blind to the value of keywords or campaigns the customer encountered during earlier stages of the buying process. This blind spot is problematic for BtoB even in good times, says Hanna, and has turned into an unmanageable “black box” in today’s economic environment where prospects may respond to many more online campaigns before converting than they may have in the past.

“All pieces of the lead management system have to work together,” says Hanna. “It has to feed properly into all processes. The focus on last click attribution among all else is a false distraction. I think there’s always a desire to find the magic step in lead generation. But maybe other activities that drive people into the lead funnel are underrated.”

The 2008 Atlas study titled “How Overlap Impacts Reach, Frequency and Conversions,” asserts that 90% of the buyers that converted were reached by placements other than the last ad seen, and that far too often the proper credit for the sale is inappropriately given to search.

Other findings from the study that concern Hanna:

•   49% of companies surveyed use a third-party web analytics program which only provides basic web site traffic data or which, by default, uses the “last click” method for connecting a prospect action (e.g., clicking on a banner ad or link in an email newsletter) with a conversion such as purchase or event registration;

•   44% use no web analytics or, in rare cases, use a custom in-house solution;

•   SMBs are changing their paid search campaigns on general search engines in very different ways depending “last click” without actually knowing the influence lead generation campaigns were having earlier in the process.

“My guess is that a lot of companies invest in lead generation without considering the website they come to,” Hanna says. “They’ve spent all their time and money on search optimization but they should spend more on analyzing what happens before and after that click.”

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