How to identify, measure, and spend on "difficult-to-track" marketing strategies
How to identify, measure, and spend on "difficult-to-track" marketing strategies
It's tough to track brand, video and newsletter ads—but that doesn't mean it doesn't drive results. We cover how to measure their ROI and unlock new channels for your marketing budget.
Misunderstood Measurement ➡️ Misaligned Budget ➡️ Inefficient Campaigns
Attribution in marketing is the backbone of confident and efficient spending. Understanding the results (in revenue, leads or accounts created) of each specific marketing activity is what allows us to allocate budget wisely.
But, by measuring results solely with click-based attribution—used by ad platforms and product analytics alike—we risk misallocating that budget.
And that’s a considerable risk.
Because, by nature, certain valuable strategies are incredibly more difficult (or borderline impossible) to measure with clicks (such as videos and podcasts) than others (paid search, retargeting).
If your budget decisions are being made solely on click-based attribution, you are leaving money on the table by ignoring valuable, but “tough-to-track”, marketing channels.
In this article, we cover how what makes a marketing strategy “difficult-to-track” and how to approach their measurement. This can open doors to new channels that your marketing team and your competitors alike could be ignoring due to a perceived “poor performance”.
The Three Pillars Affecting Click-Based Attribution
I’ve written extensively about click-based attribution in the past. I recommend reading previous articles on MMM, incrementality and discrepancies for a crash course on attribution.
The TL;DR version is that there are three variables that affect how accurate a campaign can attribute results based on clicks:
If someone clicks on a campaign AND converts in the same device, that's *chef’s kiss* easy-peasy to track. But that’s where the imbalance happens. Some campaigns really are that straightforward, whether some are not.
If the following happens to a marketing activity, you can bucket them under “tough-to-track”:
Users view, watch or read—but don’t necessarily click
Users click and convert from different devices
There’s a lag between the click and the conversion happens
The Imbalance of Click-Based Results For Different Campaign Types
Each type of campaign—from data-rich paid ads to less tangible organic efforts— presents unique challenges in tracking and valuation, shaping how we perceive their effectiveness:
Paid vs. Organic Campaigns: Paid campaigns, with controlled UTMs and click IDs, are easier to attribute than organic efforts, where link tracking is less controllable or inexistent.
Search vs. Social Campaigns: Search campaigns often lead to quicker conversions due to pre-existing intent, making them more attributable than social campaigns.
Conversion vs. Awareness Campaigns: Conversion campaigns, being clickable, are more straightforward to attribute compared to awareness campaigns, which are often viewed or watched without direct interaction.
By taking a look at these different scenarios, we start to get the picture: not all campaigns are created equal when it comes to figuring out who did what.
Strategies For Measuring “Difficult-to-Track” Campaigns
Triangulated Attribution: Combining Multiple Attribution Sources for a Fuller View
Triangulated attribution acknowledges that each strategy in marketing has unique characteristic, and hence, a one-size-fits-all measurement approach doesn’t work. Forget about that “one source of truth”.
To gain a comprehensive view, you combine multiple forms of measurement, such as:
Media Mix Modeling (MMM): Measures the impact of all marketing strategies, by leveraging econometrics to calculate the correlation between overall sales and marketing metrics (engagement, clicks, views, etc).
Click-based attribution (Ad Platform or First Party report reporting): Attributes conversions (on Google Ads, Google Analytics, Snowplow, Meta, etc) based on whether users clicked on your ad.
Attribution Surveys (AKA “How did you hear about us?” or “Zero Party Data”): These surveys directly ask customers about their reasons for conversion, capturing user-perceived influences that might not be evident through other data.
Same-Session Conversions: Getting The Best Out of Click-Based Attribution
This method focuses on capturing a user action within the same session the campaign click has happened, expanding beyond sales or product metrics that usually take longer to happen.
By nature, these are lower-friction goals, like lead events such: as subscribing to a newsletter, registering for a webinar or downloading a content asset. This enables marketers to gauge the initial response to a campaign and optimise it mid-flight. This is not possible with the forms of attribution mentioned in the previous section.
And there’s an added benefit to this. When you can successfully atribute a contact’s email to a campaign, you’re able to, later on, trace this journey all the way to completion and calculate ROAS.
Gathering a contact’s email within the first session enable both mid-flight campaign optimisation and, eventually, measuring ROAS.
For some audiences, even gathering an email takes multiple sessions. In this case, engagement metrics can be leveraged, like time on site. For brand campaigns, I usually set up “Timer Events” that fire when the user has spent an X amount of time on the page as the primary conversion goal. This enables mid-flight optimisation (for you and the ad platform’s algorithm), but, unfortunately, not ROAS measurement.
A big disclaimer on this: same session conversions only work for campaigns that generate clicks.
Vouchers: Effective For Over a Century
Voucher codes remain a potent and direct method for tracking the performance of marketing campaigns across various mediums. This age-old yet highly effective technique offers clear, straightforward attribution, allowing you to pinpoint precisely where conversions are originating and to assess the effectiveness of different channels accurately.
Voucher codes can be used in various forms:
Digital Coupons: Offered through online platforms, these codes can be used to track user engagement from specific digital campaigns.
Print Media: Traditional print advertising can include voucher codes, which when used by customers, provide direct feedback on the reach and impact of the print ad. This is also leveraged by OOH campaigns.
Email Marketing: Embedding unique (on a campaign level or user level) voucher codes in email campaigns allows for tracking the effectiveness of different messaging strategies and content. This is growing in importance as companies crack down on email tracking.
Leveraging Signal Metrics: Direct Traffic and Brand Search (Google, App Store, YouTube)
When a campaign is successful, it leaves crumbs of insights throughout your funnel. Observing trends from the following sources can help you gauge the performance of a new marketing activity:
Brand Search: Searches for your brand name on platforms like Google, App Store and YouTube.
Direct Traffic: Visitors to your website that don’t have a source or campaign associated with it. (Also: Organic Search often gets mislabeled as “Direct” on product analytics tool).
First Party Conversions: Uplift in leads or purchases, either from new leads or existing leads.
In the zero to one stage, this could be all your need.
Understanding Measurement is a Competitive Advantage for Marketing Teams
When we rely only on easily measurable and direct metrics, like click-based attribution, there's a risk of misjudging our marketing budget's efficiency.
By crowding marketing budget into these easy-to-track spaces, we can drive up our acquisition costs without realising it. Since most companies rely (solely) on click-based attribution, they’re all making decisions on based on the same set of data. This drives competition and acquisition cost of certain channels, like Paid Search.
Meanwhile, less conspicuous avenues like podcasts or videos, though seemingly challenging to quantify, might offer more cost-effective results.
Alternative forms of measurement enable marketing teams to spend smarter.
Alternative forms of measurement aren’t meant to fill gaps in out data sheets. They’re there to quantify true performance of different marketing channels and enable teams to spend smarter. Data can go beyond a dashboard and become a competitive advantage for your business.
Leveraging Data for Improved Marketing Performance
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I also do marketing data and growth consultancy for companies like Microsoft, WeTransfer, dbt Labs and more. If you’re interested, head to my website and reach out.