report
The State of Marketing Attribution in 2024
New research from the mid-size and enterprise perspective.
Marketing attribution is changing. In the past few years, marketing attribution has undergone a notable shift towards advanced data analytics and machine learning to predict pipelines and develop a deeper understanding of the marketing funnel. With this shift comes questions on how marketers use attribution to understand and optimize marketing programs and what challenges marketers face. To help answer these questions Ascend2 and RevSure fielded the Marketing Attribution Approach Survey. This report, titled Marketing Attribution from the Mid-Size and Enterprise Perspective, represents the opinions of the 130 marketing professionals responding to the survey who represent companies with 50 or more employees.
Introduction
The Importance of Marketing Attribution
The Challenges with Marketing Attribution
Marketers are Struggling with Getting Meaningful Insight From Traditional Attribution Solutions
Most Difficult Channels to Measure
The Need to Improve Attribution Accuracy
Attribution Goals
Using Attribution to Optimize Marketing
What to Look For in an Attribution Platform
Metrics for Measuring Performance
Data Review Frequency
Maximize Marketing Results With RevSure Deep Funnel Attribution
Gain true full-funnel attribution
Move beyond first- or last-touch attribution. Gain full-funnel insight with advanced Markov Chain modeling and data integration.
See lead journeys by buying stage
Map touchpoints to the buying stage for each lead. See which campaigns perform best, have the highest engagement, and contribute most to the pipeline.
Learn the highest converting channels
Understand which channels contribute the most to conversion at each stage of the funnel.
Understand common buyer paths
Craft your campaigns based on the most effective conversion paths from buyers, based on conversion to pipeline.
Deep dive into each channel
Analyze each channel individually to understand the composition and highest-performing demographics.
Optimize the next best action
Use attribution and conversion paths to optimize the next best action for a cohort of leads, keep buyers engaged, and increase the likelihood of converting.
An overwhelming 98% of marketing professionals agree that marketing attribution is vital to the overall success of their marketing strategy. Why is attribution so important? Every touchpoint of a customer provides valuable insight into your best lead sources, campaigns, channels, and more. Accurate attribution clarifies each step of the customer’s journey and provides a deeper understanding of the sales and marketing funnel, allowing marketers to scale up their best-converting campaigns.
Limited resources (46%) and complexities (46%) are the top challenges preventing marketing attribution implementation. Interestingly, both challenges align around implementing a software solution providing full-funnel attribution. With full-funnel attribution, the software can maximize your resources and minimize the complexity of multiple campaigns.
Marketing attribution is challenging, as only 29% consider themselves very successful (best-in-class) at using attribution to achieve strategic objectives. The remaining 71% of marketers need to improve their marketing attribution program to make better decisions and, as a result, improve their overall marketing program. This report provides current research on the state of marketing attribution and tips and strategies to help you improve your attribution program.
Word-of-mouth marketing is highly effective but is also the most difficult to measure (52%). The following chart is an excellent reminder not to allow attribution challenges to hinder your channels. Email marketing is still the workhorse of most marketing programs but still has measurement challenges (32%).
Dark Social, the growing trend of sharing links or content through private messaging platforms and channels, is good because people share your content but challenging because the sharing activity is not immediately visible and attributable to a specific marketing activity. More sophisticated attribution platforms allow marketers to shed light on Dark Social activities and proactively use tactics like word-of-mouth.
Only 31% of marketing professionals are extremely confident in the accuracy of their marketing attributions. Without accurate marketing attribution, marketing professionals risk misallocating resources and budgets, potentially investing in ineffective channels while neglecting those that truly drive results. This lack of precision can hinder informed decision-making, impede campaign optimization, and ultimately lead to wasted efforts and diminished returns on investment.
The overall goal of attribution is to close more deals. However, taking a deeper look at what marketing professionals want to accomplish with attribution, the top goal is improving marketing efficiency and effectiveness (47%). Improved efficiency saves money, and improved effectiveness allocates your resources to the best channels, increasing ROI.
"We are struggling with accurate attribution of qualified leads and opportunities, understanding which marketing initiatives are most effective, mapping accurate prospect journeys, and identifying the most impactful touches for conversion," said the Head of Demand Generation.
Currently, over half of marketers report that they analyze the quality 59% of marketing professionals use traditional attribution to improve targeting and messaging, followed by 53% to enhance the customer experience. Effective attribution allows you to optimize the next best action for a customer, keep them engaged, and increase the likelihood of converting. Forward-looking attribution offers the advantage of predicting future trends and allocating resources more effectively.
The AI-powered RevSure solution improves marketing efficiency and effectiveness by optimizing your go-to-market strategy, creating more pipeline, covering more opportunities, and driving more revenue. The easy-to-use solution allows you to:
• Understand the effectiveness of every marketing campaign
• Make better decisions about how to allocate the budget
• Scale up top-performing campaigns
• Drive conversions and revenue
Easy setup and integrations (52%) and in-depth reporting (43%) are the top features that marketing professionals want in a marketing attribution platform. Full-funnel attribution (31%) is also critical, especially if you want to optimize every touchpoint in the buyer journey. Full-funnel attribution is crucial in a marketing attribution platform as it provides a comprehensive view of the customer journey, enabling marketers to understand the impact of each touchpoint across the entire sales funnel and make informed decisions to optimize performance at every stage.
"I need to easily understand the cross-funnel conversion and impact of not just campaigns but Ad groups and Ads too. This is a big ask from my CMO”
- Head of Demand Gen, Data Security SaaS
Over half (55%) of marketers surveyed use return on investment (ROI) to measure the success of their marketing campaigns. Business outcomes met (43%) and cost per lead/acquisition (45%) are also important metrics for marketing professionals to measure success
RevSure unites marketing attribution and full-funnel management for unprecedented insight into buyer journeys. Map conversion paths through every touchpoint and understand the best next action to keep buyers engaged. RevSure’s AI-powered Deep Funnel Attribution lets you:
• Gain true full-funnel attribution
• Learn the highest-converting channels and campaigns
• Deep-dive into each channel
• Understand common buyer paths
• See lead journeys by buying stage
• Optimize your next best marketing action
• Adjust your marketing mix across the full funnel
The frequency that marketing professionals review attribution data provides insight into its importance. Over one-third (35%) review their data at least once a month, and 43% review it at least once a quarter. A monthly or quarterly review allows for a comprehensive analysis of data trends and can help make strategic adjustments to maximize your overall marketing performance.
The RevSure attribution solution saves valuable time and effort by providing data visualization into your marketing funnel and pipeline. See which leads and opportunities are converting into revenue so you can focus on driving and closing winnable deals. See RevSure in action.
Number of Employees
More than 500 employees 45%
50 - 500 employees 55%
Primary Job Role
Owner / Partner / C-Level 19%
Vice President / Director / Manager 58%
Non-Management Professional 23%
Ascend2 benchmarks the performance of marketing strategies, tactics, and the technology that drives them with a standardized online questionnaire and a proprietary 3-minute Survey format. This survey was fielded to a panel of marketing professionals and marketing research subscribers.
