Marketing Attribution Tools: Tracking and Analyzing Marketing Channel Performance

In the dynamic landscape of digital marketing, understanding the impact of your campaigns and accurately attributing conversions is crucial for making informed decisions. That’s where marketing attribution tools come into play. In this blog, we will explore the world of marketing attribution tools and delve into their significance in measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. From multi-touch attribution models to advanced analytics, these tools provide insights into the customer journey and help optimize your marketing strategies. Join us on this journey as we uncover the power of marketing attribution tools and their ability to drive data-driven decision-making for maximum impact.

What are marketing attribution tools?

Marketing attribution tools help businesses understand which marketing efforts are most effective by tracking and attributing credit for sales or conversions to the various touchpoints in the customer journey.

Touchpoints include online and offline advertising, email campaigns, social media interactions, and more.

Attribution tools work by tracking customer interactions with different marketing channels and assigning a value or “credit” to each touchpoint.

These values are then used to determine the overall effectiveness of each marketing channel.

With the right marketing attribution tool, businesses can answer the most complex questions commonly asked by executives and clients, such as:

• How does marketing help bring in clients?
• How can we drive more sales using marketing?
• What campaigns are most effective—or least effective—at turning leads into customers?
• What is my return on marketing investment?
• What marketing activities drive the highest lifetime value?
• Where should I be spending my money?

Why are marketing attribution tools important?

There are some great benefits to looking more closely at marketing attribution, and the tools and software we’re going to look at will help you make the most of them. Here are three key benefits:

1. Gain a source of truth on what’s working—and what isn’t.

Marketing attribution software will help you quickly identify your most effective marketing channels.

When managing your budgets, you’ll be able to spend more resources on the channels that have the most impact and reduce spending on those that aren’t providing value in the customer journey.

2. Discover how many touches your leads need before converting

If you just launched a new ad campaign or published a new piece of content, it can be disheartening if you don’t see conversions build up quickly.

12% of inbound marketing budget cuts directly result from no proven channel ROI.

Marketing attribution software will help you prove the ROI of your channels, even if your leads only engage with them once or twice, at the start or middle of their buying journey.

Also read : Lead Scoring – Definition and Method For Your Marketing Scoring

3. Get data-driven insights to improve marketing strategies

With marketing attribution software, you can reveal which lead generation techniques impact your ROI best and allocate your budget accordingly.

The best marketing attribution tools for 2024

These tools will give your team access to actionable data that will help optimize future marketing campaigns and budgets.

Your team will gain access to actionable data that will help optimize future marketing campaigns and budgets.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all tool when it comes to marketing attribution. But, each platform has a unique set of features, capabilities, and benefits.

Let’s look at what they are as we explore the top marketing attribution tools for 2024 and beyond.

1. Ruler Analytics

First on our list is Ruler. We may sound biased, but once you see it, you’ll understand why.

Ruler is a closed-loop marketing attribution tool that helps you gain insight into your ROI.

It tracks the entire customer journey at the visitor level on a first-party basis, including the marketing source from each session, page views, UTM variables, Click IDs, and Cookie IDs.

Once an anonymous visitor converts into a lead, Ruler matches the user’s details to their marketing touchpoints and sends the data to your CRM.

This allows you to enrich your leads and opportunities with attribution data so you can see exactly how your marketing impacts pipeline generation.

Whenever a lead closes into a deal, the revenue data is sent back into the Ruler dashboard, allowing you to track the ROI of your marketing more accurately.

Ruler has recently introduced marketing mix modeling, allowing you to statistically attribute revenue to clicks and ad views and track exactly what marketing efforts generate your highest ROI.

Ruler offers several features that provide valuable insight into your marketing spend’s ROI and performance.

• Marketing attribution: Automatically attributes revenue to back the marketing source and touchpoints that played a role in converting leads into deals.
• Marketing mix modeling: Uses machine learning to determine the impact of your invisible touchpoints such as TV, ad impressions, and radio without click data.
• Data-driven attribution: Combines dynamic data and mathematical modeling to understand how marketing activities collectively impact conversions and revenue.
• Predictive analytics: Predicts future business outcomes by analyzing historical data through statistical models and machine learning.

Pricing

They are starting at £199 per month for Ruler. By paying annually, you can save 20%. Agency partners can receive special prices.

2. Adinton

Adinton is a complete marketing optimization suite that includes tools to help with your marketing attribution.

The tool tracks your marketing spend, clicks, and conversions and then reports back to you on how effective each channel was with information on whether you under or over-invested in various channels.

Once the data is collected, Adinton helps you take steps to improve your campaign performance and use your marketing resources in the most effective ways.

They also compile cross-device, cross-domain, and offline data, to help you see the full picture.

Price:

From $79/month

Best for:

All-in-one suite of marketing tools

3. Adjust

Adjust is a mobile attribution platform to help you grow your mobile app with actionable data.

The Adjust platform is powerful. You can see which ads led to which conversions, down to the ad creatives that your users saw.

Unlike many other tools, they’ve built an anti-fraud system into their platform to ensure your data and budget are safe and never misrepresented.

They integrate directly with over 2,000 advertising partners, so you can easily set up and capture your campaign data.

Price:

Available upon request

Best for:

Companies who want to uncover their top acquisition sources

4. Adobe Analytics

If you’re in the Adobe ecosystem already and plan on staying there, then Adobe Analytics‘ built-in Attribution modeling tools are a great option.

Adobe Analytics includes all the functionality you’ll need, including advanced statistics and machine learning, to help you and your team determine your marketing effectiveness and show you exactly how your customers become purchase-ready.

If you want to use Adobe Analytics for your marketing attribution, you’ll need to receive a custom quote from them based on your traffic levels and requirements.

Price:

Available upon request, but expect to pay $30,000 to $100,000/year

Best for:

Companies that are already using the Adobe ecosystem

5. AppsFlyer

If your business revolves around a mobile app, Appsflyer is for you.

As the name suggests, AppsFlyer is a marketing attribution tool for mobile apps and helps marketers attribute their app installs to touchpoints across the web.

This will help you optimize your campaigns and attribute conversions to the channels you promote your product, including the app stores, Facebook, Google Ads, TV, email, or organic traffic.

Price:

Available on request. Reports say that the price starts at $0.05 per app install.

Best for:

Businesses that revolve around a mobile app

6. Funnel

Funnel is a data collection tool that turns marketing and advertising data into automated reports to help you make smarter decisions about your budgets and targeting.

Funnel lets you quickly review your campaign data from every channel in one place to understand how each channel ties into your goals.

As the data is all collected by Funnel, you won’t need to stitch together data from multiple sources.

So, you’ll save time and energy when compiling your reports. You can also import the data into your favorite tools like Google Data Studio, Sheets, and Google Analytics.

Price:

From $499/month

Best for:

Collecting advertising data and compiling it into one location

7. Google Attribution

Google’s Attribution feature is still in Beta, but this is a great option if you regularly run campaigns on Google Ads and don’t have the budget for other attribution tools.

It’s part of the Google Analytics ecosystem, and Google Attribution provides additional insight into your Google Ads performance.

It’s available to all advertisers for free. As you would expect from any attribution tool, it helps you understand multi-click and multi-channel journeys in a way that’s impossible to do manually.

You can make smarter decisions about your ad targeting to ensure that your campaigns bring the best results.

Price:

Free

Best for:

Teams running Google Ads

8. HubSpot Attribution

Most of you have likely heard of HubSpot. It’s a leader in sales and marketing automation. But it’s also making waves in the attribution space.

HubSpot Analytics connects your CRM and marketing data, allowing you to credit different touchpoints at every customer journey stage.

With its attribution reporting, you can identify which specific channels are moving the needle on revenue and make smarter decisions to improve your marketing performance.

Price:

Available upon request, but expect to pay £2900+/month

Best for:

Teams who are already using HubSpot

9. Neustar

Are they investing in offline campaigns? Neustar is for you. Neustar’s multi-touch attribution software helps marketers monitor the results of both their online and offline campaigns.

It allows marketers to fully understand their customer journey and identify what impact their omnichannel campaigns are having on their conversions.

With Neustar’s data, you can optimize your campaigns in real-time and make the most of your budgets.

Price:

Available on request.

Best for:

Companies investing in offline advertising

10. Oktopost

Oktopost is a social media distribution and attribution platform for B2B marketers.

It integrates with popular marketing automation platforms like Marketo, Eloqua, and Act-On, and enriches your leads with the data it collects.

Instead of waiting, hoping that your social media efforts are paying off, Oktopost will show you whether they’re working.

So, you can either refocus your energy or double down on what’s working.

You can track leads back to the original social media post they saw and engaged with and get insights into your campaigns’ performance.

Price:

Available on request.

Best for:

B2B companies investing in social media

11. Inclusive

Inclusive is for you if your company is investing in PR or regularly being featured in publications worldwide.

Inclusive is a PR analytics and attribution tool that improves how your brand communicates with the world.

Rather than merely monitoring brand mentions, Inclusive lets you see the impact those mentions are having and provides insight into how you can amplify and optimize your media mentions to grow your visibility.

If you want PR to act as a growth lever, this is the perfect tool.

Price:

Available on request

Best for:

PR attribution

12. Oribi

Oribi is an all-in-one analytics and attribution tool and a good alternative to Google Analytics.

You’ll have access to much of the same data as in Google Analytics.

Although, Oribi breaks your data into actionable insights rather than simply displaying it and leaving you to do the reporting work.

Oribi’s marketing attribution features allow you to see your data in different models.

You can view the touchpoints in your conversions to help you optimize your marketing and acquisition strategies.

Price:

From $300/month

Best for:

Companies looking for a Google Analytics alternative

13. Terminus

Terminus is an account-based marketing (ABM) platform with robust marketing attribution capabilities.

For smaller businesses, Terminus may be too much. But it’s a serious piece of software for bigger teams running ABM campaigns.

Terminus contains many features to help with ABM workflows, but the analytics section is powerful and detailed.

You’ll see information on how your various campaigns tie back to revenue and how effectively they work.

Price:

Available on request only

Best for:

Companies using account-based marketing

Also read : Brand Monitoring Tools: Protecting and Managing Your Brand’s Online Reputation

Conclusion

As we conclude our exploration of marketing attribution tools, it’s clear that they are invaluable assets in today’s data-driven marketing landscape. These tools empower businesses to gain deep insights into the effectiveness of their campaigns, understand customer behavior, and optimize marketing strategies accordingly. By accurately attributing conversions and identifying the most impactful touchpoints, marketing attribution tools enable businesses to allocate resources more efficiently, enhance ROI, and drive growth. Embracing these tools can transform your marketing approach from guesswork to informed decision-making, ultimately propelling your business toward success. So, leverage the power of marketing attribution tools and unlock the full potential of your marketing efforts in this ever-evolving digital era.

FAQs

What are marketing attribution tools?

These tools are software or platforms that help businesses track and analyze the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, attributing conversions and sales to specific marketing channels, campaigns, or touchpoints. These tools provide insights into which marketing activities contribute most to customer acquisition and retention.

Why are marketing attribution tools important?

These tools are important because they enable businesses to measure and understand their marketing activities’ impact accurately. Businesses can allocate resources more effectively, optimize their marketing strategies, and improve overall ROI by identifying the channels and touchpoints that drive conversions.

What types of attribution models do marketing attribution tools use?

These tools use various attribution models, including first-touch attribution, last-touch attribution, linear attribution, time decay attribution, and more. Each model assigns credit to different touchpoints along the customer journey, providing a holistic view of how marketing efforts contribute to conversions.

How do marketing attribution tools handle multi-channel campaigns?

These tools handle multi-channel campaigns using sophisticated algorithms and data analysis techniques to assign credit to each marketing touchpoint based on its impact on conversions. These tools consider cross-channel interactions and help businesses understand how various channels work together to drive results.

Can marketing attribution tools work with offline marketing efforts?

Yes, these tools can work with offline marketing efforts. They can track and attribute conversions from offline channels, such as print advertisements, direct mail, or events, using unique identifiers, promotional codes, or custom tracking methods. This gives businesses a comprehensive view of their marketing impact across both online and offline channels.