Attribution of leads generated on a website is one of the hardest things for a digital marketer to do, especially today with the number of different sources and ways a visitor can find a website. While it’s always nice to be able to see what source initially brought in a visitor and how it is credited with their conversion, there is so much more to attribution reporting that can give a marketer a better look into what is and isn’t working within their highly complex string of campaigns. Knowing this, here is a handful of other ways in which you can use attribution reporting to continually improve results generated by your digital marketing campaigns.
Find out which internal site pages and blog articles are assisting in lead conversions
What it is
This type of attribution report pulls in a list of internal site pages and blog posts that have helped assist the conversion of a visitor (meaning that the lead viewed this specific page before going on to fill out a form on your website).
What to look for
Once you’ve pulled these numbers together, spend your time searching through the list of page titles to see if you can spot any that stand out as unconventional. Because this report includes pages that are viewed before conversion, a number of landing pages for your various offers will be included here and most likely will be near the top of the list. Instead of focusing on these obvious conversion assists, look for things like specific site pages and blog posts. These pages will give you a better idea of the non-optimized (for conversions) pages that are helping your campaign the most.
How to use positive results to drive even better results
When you find pages that stand out as major conversion assists, make sure that they become more visible in your campaigns moving forward. Whether that means making a site page more easily accessible by placing it on your top navigation or by including a successful blog in nurturing emails, make sure that you use your newly found knowledge of helpful pages to let them shine.
How to use negative results to get better
While a little harder to spot (since you mostly use the report to find pages that are assisting), you can search this list of conversion assists to see if there are poor performing pages (those with few to no assists) that should be performing better. Perhaps you have a major site page that was created to showcase a specific service and offer set that isn’t generating as many leads as you had hoped. If you find pages like these with poor numbers, use it as a sign to start digging deeper to better understand why it isn’t assisting conversion and how you can rework it to improve its numbers moving forward.
Find out which web pages and referrals are providing the most leads
What it is
This report looks through all of the internal pages and external referrals that assisted in converting visitors of your site into leads.
What to look for
Use the results of this report to find correlations between the content consumed by site visitors both before and while on your site and their conversion. This report may include referring sources from outside your own site as well as internal site pages, landing pages and blog posts. Be sure to spend the majority of your time looking for non-optimized (for conversions) pages as well as referring sources to better understand where the majority of your leads are coming from and what they are consuming before converting.
How to use positive results to drive even better results
Understanding where the majority of your leads are coming from and what content they are consuming the most are very valuable pieces of knowledge. If leads continue to come from a particular referral source, create more detailed strategy around leveraging it more. If certain topics found on the majority of the pages with high conversion assists continue to pop up, plan to build out more content around that in the future.
How to use negative results to get better
Depending on how you analyze this report, there are a number of different things you can take away to help you improve results for less productive areas of your website and campaign. If you find that (like in the positive results above) that only a few topics are really driving conversions, you may want to take a step back to rethink how you generate content on the other topics or services your campaigns promote. If you see that a large majority of your leads are coming from only a small section of your website or campaign, you may want to begin to search for new ways in which you can diversify your content and promotion so that you can create a more stable and sustainable lead generation campaign.
Find out which site pages/landing pages are connected with more qualified leads
What it is
This report takes a list of your marketing qualified leads (leads who meet a certain set of criteria to be passed on to sales for final qualification) and looks for similarities in conversions and assists.
What to look for
Use the results of this report to find correlations between the quality of the leads and the content that they consumed before converting as a lead on your website. This report may include referring sources from outside your own site as well as internal site pages, landing pages and blog posts. Be sure to spend the majority of your time looking for any connections between lead quality and certain sources (are more MQL’s coming from this specific referral?) and specific landing pages and offers (are MQL’s more likely to download this specific offer?).
How to use positive results to drive even better results
Once you believe you’ve found a correlation between qualified leads and content, start to make those paths easier to convert. If in your analysis of your report you find that qualified leads are more likely to visit a specific product page, make sure it’s easier to find and is promoted more often throughout your different areas of marketing including social media and email. If you find that a specific referral source continues to produce higher quality leads, begin to develop more detailed strategy on how you can further leverage that referral in the future.
How to use negative results to get better
While again, this report mainly focuses on the successes of various referral sources and conversion assists, you can walk away with a list of areas that you can work on to improve your campaign moving forward. In your analysis, you may notice that a large majority of your qualified leads are only coming from one referral source. While this may be a positive, you may be worried about your lack of diversity in your lead generation. Most likely, that well is going to dry up and if you aren’t proactive in finding other sources for quality lead generation, you may find yourself hurting badly. Also while in your analysis of the report, you may find a correlation between unqualified leads and the paths they take to conversion. By spotting this, you may be able to create separate nurturing sequences that more quickly filter out these leads so that you can spend more of your time focused on higher quality leads.
Attribution reporting is one of the most advanced areas of digital marketing and one that can take time and brainpower to fully comprehend. While initially intimidating, these reports can provide an enormous amount of valuable insight that can ultimately lead to the types of changes and marketing decisions that drive incredible results. Have a question about these attribution reports? Think I missed something? Want to share a different report you’ve used in the past? Share it with me in the comments below or email me directly at mherschberger@revriv.com.