A Complete Guide To B2B Multitouch Attribution Models

Ca
3 min readNov 1, 2022

A Complete Guide To B2B Multitouch Attribution Models

Executives have always desired a “single source of truth” to measure marketing effectiveness and avoid wasted ad spending.

John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

While today’s data-driven marketers have untold access to data and metrics, the question is still as valid today as it was in John’s day

Which marketing activities contribute to the bottom line — and which ones do not?

Each online platform — be it Instagram, Facebook ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn, or YouTube — wants you to spend more money with it.

But it is not always possible to gain the full picture of accurate marketing performance.

Thankfully for us marketers, multi-touch (or multi-funnel) attribution may be the solution.

A multi-touch attribution model (MTA) enables you to understand each touchpoint’s role in creating a new customer.

This shows you what to leverage to boost performance and hit growth targets.

That’s why it is so important to gain a complete picture since every touchpoint a customer has with your brand can influence their decision to convert.

Once you understand which touchpoints result in conversions, you can better allocate your budgets to similar touchpoints in the future and reduce funds from less effective ones.

Jump to:

  1. 1.First, How Does Multi-Touch Attribution Work?
  2. 2.What Is Multi-touch Attribution?
  3. 3.What Multi Funnel Attribution Is Not
  4. 4.Why Adopt A Multi-touch Attribution Approach For B2B Marketing
  5. 5.Quick Overview Of The Types Of Multi-Touch Attribution Models
  6. 6.How To Deploy Multi-funnel Attribution For B2B

First, How Does Multi-Touch Attribution Work?

Multi funnel attribution — also known as multi-touch attribution — is a way to measure conversions.

It considers every touchpoint in the customer marketing journey and gives tribute to each channel to show the value of each touchpoint.

The challenge most marketers face is which channel or touchpoint to credit and how much to credit each touchpoint for the conversion.

In the graph showing a customer journey above, should the Facebook ad (first touchpoint) get all the credit, the Google paid-search ad (last), or all of them?

We’ll take you through all the attribution models to better understand how you could shape your measurements.

What Is Multi-touch Attribution?

Multi-touch attribution models refer to those that evaluate and weigh the impact of several touchpoints, not all attribution models.

As a result, they only consider the first or last touchpoint encountered before a conversion rather than every touchpoint encountered throughout the sales cycle.

Conclusion

Multi-touch attribution allows B2B marketers to respond more rapidly to changes in their target audience and greater market.

The granular understanding they are given at an account level of which elements of their campaigns are working — and those that are not — means they can be flexible, agile, and competitive.

They have clarity into every touchpoint on the B2B customer journey, empowering marketing teams to make better data-backed decisions going forward.

Remember, B2B marketing attribution isn’t so much about budget as what marketing teams are doing.

Finding the right attribution model is imperative to success.

If yours is not supplementing your strategy with useful data, it will negatively impact your performance.

Every dot of data, every graph, and report should give you more insights into your ideal customer and their typical behavior.

As modern B2B marketers, we must have multiple weapons in our digital arsenal.

This will bring clarity to data chaos and give the organization an edge that will help them forge ahead with confidence.

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