The Basics Uncovered: What Attribution with Marketo Means for Your Business

Marketing attribution is giving a value to a marketing initiative, whether it’s a value of pipeline or revenue influence or count of successful engagements. It allows you to identify which marketing efforts are driving the most significant impact on your business outcomes.

By leveraging Marketo’s attribution capabilities, you can trace the customer journey and determine which campaigns, channels, and touchpoints contribute most effectively to conversions and revenue. This insight enables you to optimize your marketing strategy, allocate resources more efficiently, and justify marketing spend to stakeholders. Understanding attribution helps in making data-driven decisions that enhance overall marketing performance and ROI.

The Competitive Edge: Why Attribution with Marketo Matters

Understanding what marketing initiatives are best at:

• Furthering a faster journey
• Generating a more qualified person to support opportunities
• Relationship between points in a journey to understand what engagements will generate the best person and experience to higher opp $
• Generating more opportunities and the highest value of an opp
• Understanding target account opportunity journeys

The Perfect Moment: When Attribution with Marketo is Most Effective

• Tracking acquisition program data
  • Tracking clear program statuses and success statuses consistently
• Tracking lifecycle stages
  • Tracking engagements at different parts of a prospect or customer’s journey
• Tracking opportunity data
  • It wanting to track attribution towards pipeline and revenue related data
• Defined terms for what success looks like for initiatives or a program:
  • Does it mean generating the most leads?
  • Does it mean supporting pipeline?
  • Does it mean opp creation?

Blueprint for Success: How to Execute Attribution with Marketo

Chart Keys:

Insights Level

Building Level of Effort:

1. Minimal Effort: Utilizing out-of-the-box reports provided by Marketo that require minimal customization. These reports are pre-built and readily available, allowing you to quickly generate and access basic insights with little to no effort.
2. Moderate Effort: Involves a deeper understanding of what specific questions you want to answer and familiarity with the fields and filters in Marketo to build customized reports. This level requires some effort to configure and tailor reports to meet specific needs.
3. Significant Effort: Entails downloading raw data from Marketo and manually manipulating it using external tools such as Excel or a data analysis software. This level involves extensive effort, including data extraction, cleaning, transformation, and detailed analysis to derive insights that are not readily available within Marketo’s reporting features.

Reporting Goal: 

The team is trying to understand:

• What drives new names (lead creation)?
  • In addition, understand the ROI of a new name
• What drives MQLs (conversion)?
  • In addition, understand the ROI of an MQL
• What is the connection between a new name marketing tactic to an MQL marketing tactic?

The goal of understanding these reporting metrics is to better strategize on what marketing tactics drive the best journey and most qualified new names that convert to MQLs.

Current State:

• Team is reporting on the acquisition program (what drives the new name)
• Team has MQL defined and tracked in custom marketo fields:
  • Recommend reviewing the person source program for first, every, last source and UTM management program

What can the team report on in the current state:

• Lead creation acquisition: single touch model 
  • This attributes all the credit to the marketing tactic that drove the new name
  • Team can look at it from two angles:
    • Which acquisition program drives the most new names and trends over time?
      • Person Performance Report in MKTO:
        • Group by acquisition program
      • Smart List in Marketo:
        • Create a view by Acquisition Program, Acquisition Program Date, New Member Program, New Member Program Date
        • export the doc
      • Drop in excel:
        • Create a line chart by month & series by new name program
          • This will show trends over time by program generating most new names
        • Create a histogram (bar chart by program name)
          • This will show which program, in general, is driving the most new names
    • Which acquisition program drives the most names that convert to MQLs:
      • Drop in excel:
        • Create a count table by program name for new names x new member program
          • This will show what program drives the most new names that convert to new member
        • Create a pivot table columns = new name, rows = new member
          • Add conditional formatting by the scale and change the count to new member
          • This will show what journey of new names to new members is best at driving new members
        • Create a line chart by month & series by new member program
          • This will show trends over time by program generating the most new members
        • Create a histogram (bar chart by new member program)
          • This will show which program, in general, is driving the most new  members

End goal: 

• Pivot Table: this will show a textual relationship by which the new name program generates the most new names and then how many of those new names convert to a MQL
• Heat Map: the best visual representation of the data available to show the relationship between the new name program and the MQL program. If the team has the CPl or ROI for MQLs, then the metric within the heat chart could be that instead of count.
• Line chart: shows the trend of new names/MQLs over time by their program to better understand when and what a person is engaging with
• Histogram: shows a generic count of what programs are generating new names/MQLs

The Dream Team: Who Should Handle Attribution with Marketo

• Marketing Platform Operations (Marketo Platform Admin)

• Reason: The Marketo Platform Admin is responsible for the setup, configuration, and maintenance of the Marketo platform. Their deep understanding of the technical aspects and capabilities of Marketo ensures that the attribution models are correctly implemented and optimized. They can manage the integration of Marketo with other systems, configure tracking mechanisms, and ensure data accuracy and consistency, which are critical for reliable attribution reporting.

• Marketing Intelligence (Data Analysis)

• Reason: The marketing analyst specializes in data analysis and interpretation, making them ideal for handling the analysis of attribution data. They can dive deep into the data to uncover insights, identify trends, and provide actionable recommendations based on the attribution reports. Their expertise in data analytics allows them to transform raw data into meaningful insights that drive strategic decisions and optimize marketing performance.

Conclusion

Marketing attribution assigns value to marketing initiatives, quantifying their impact on pipeline, revenue, or successful engagements. It helps identify which marketing efforts significantly influence business outcomes.

By leveraging Marketo’s attribution capabilities, you can trace customer journeys and pinpoint the most effective campaigns, channels, and touchpoints for driving conversions and revenue. This insight allows for optimizing marketing strategies, efficiently allocating resources, and justifying marketing spend to stakeholders. Understanding attribution fosters data-driven decision-making, enhancing overall marketing performance and ROI.