In order for effective allocation of investment dollars in alternative marketing channels to result in a competitive advantage, revenue attribution has to be integrated into marketing reports and planning.  This means understanding what the fully attributed results are, by marketing channel, individual campaign, and customer segment.  Marketing reporting is not complete unless it includes attribution.  The best strategy is to make revenue attribution a standard part of all marketing results reports.

Once revenue attribution is integrated into marketing results reporting, it is just as important to integrate these fully attributed results into the planning process.   Investment cut-offs, whether they take into account payback periods or subsequent value must be based on fully allocated results.  It is not uncommon for the number of attributed orders for a given campaign and customer segment to be larger than the number of sourced orders.  The missed opportunity by underinvesting, because revenue attribution is not used, can be enormous.

Revenue attribution is not an exact science, but not incorporating any attribution of orders having unknown sources is clearly a high-risk decision.  We balance the risk by learning as much as we can from the orders we can source and what we know ourselves and learn from our customers about the complex paths and touch points that lead to a purchase.  Our goal is to use revenue attribution to make decisions about marketing investments that are directionally better than what we were doing before or what our competition is doing.  The payback potential from doing this is significant.

Also see Revenue Attribution White Paper authored by Richard Hodges

About Richard Hodges
Richard Hodges is a database marketing veteran and is Clario’s Vice President of Customer Insight Solutions since 2010. Richard has over 20 years’ experience on the business side of database marketing and has implemented reporting solutions, migration models and customer value analyses for a number of customer-focused retailers. Richard has been a returning lecturer on CRM topics for MBA programs at Boston College, Dartmouth and MIT. He has also served as an adjunct professor of CRM for the Boston College Carroll School of Management MBA program.