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Marketing attribution is a complicated topic. If you do a quick Google search, you’ll find thousands and thousands of articles about attribution, and there are almost as many opinions about what is the “right” way to do it. This means that sometimes even the savviest marketers don’t talk about the challenges they face navigating their way through attribution, despite the growing call to demonstrate ROI.
We’re changing that — starting with a new approach to marketing attribution.
Allocadia has just released a new attribution engine as part of its Marketing Performance Management solution that links attribution data to a global, integrated view of investments. And by that I mean, linking attribution to the ‘I’ in ROI.
In one basic way, Allocadia’s attribution engine meets the expectations of marketers already using attribution solutions from other vendors: We support all standard attribution models (first touch, last touch, multi-touch equal weighted, multi-touch custom weighted, time-decay), and we can fine tune any model using variables such as responses, contact roles, and time.
But that’s where the similarities with other attribution solutions end.
Allocadia’s attribution engine creates new performance insights because of the core capabilities that surround attribution, namely in budgeting and planning. Keep reading for four important ways that our solution is different, allowing marketers to transform the way they think about attribution.
4 Ways the Allocadia Attribution Engine Is Different
Difference #1: Allocadia Provides a Full Performance Picture
The majority of attribution vendors only view actual performance – the historical perspective of what’s been done. While understanding information after the fact is helpful for future planning, it doesn’t help you make real-time course corrections.
By combining what was actually done in the past with what’s happening today and what is expected to happen in the future, Allocadia software provides a complete forward-looking view of performance. Marketers can review returns data and forecast performance to understand if they’re on track to hit targets and identify any gaps early.
Allocadia’s integration platform enables the view of past and current performance and our revenue performance planner enables the planned view. These then come together to create a strong forward-looking view of performance.
Difference #2: Allocadia Begins with Financials
You can’t determine ROI without the ‘I’ — the investment. Traditional attribution solutions start with campaigns and demonstrate which campaigns are most effective in sourcing leads and pipeline — then tack on the investment piece after-the-fact. The investment piece is often a static input that is only part of the investment picture and an inaccurate one that is not up-to-date with financial systems.
Allocadia is a full planning and budgeting application and as such, it manages your full investment data plus can be connected to ERP to give an even more complete picture of your financials. Because our software automatically links the financial data that’s already within Allocadia with your attribution data, it is both accurate and current, enabling you to determine the true value of marketing. Other vendors who claim to marry attribution with ROI can only bring in historical ERP invoice data.
Allocadia starts with investments which serves two beneficial purposes:
- First, you get a global, integrated view of performance by connecting to financial systems. This means you get the full financial picture across your entire marketing organization, from regions and business units, to all activities, both offline and online. You also get a full view of all investment data including targets, plans, commits, actuals and forecasts which you can all marry up to attribution data.
- Second, you set the right data foundation in order to measure performance in a practical way. Meaning, you have a consistent, marketing organizational view of spend across your global marketing organization. You are also more easily able to make sense of your performance data with a structure to map it back to. This enables organizations to get real meaningful traction in moving towards the reality of a true comprehensive global view of performance.
Difference #3: Allocadia Provides ROI at Multiple Levels
Other attribution and ROI vendors typically come at performance from a campaign perspective and many are also often enabling the execution of digital campaigns. Because of this, they only have data about digital campaigns, and attribute revenue solely by campaign (and can sometimes extend to channel as well). This is helpful if you just want to look at ROI through a more functional activity-level or tactical execution lens. CMOs, however, need to understand attribution and performance data on multiple levels, from the highest level down to the tactical marketing level and view performance by strategic marketing views.
Allocadia software has the marketing organizational hierarchy which means we can provide views of performance by region, team, business unit at a more aggregate level. With strategic plan dimensions, we can also provide views of performance at the activity level not just by campaign, but also by corporate objective, campaign theme or product line for example.
Enabling an aggregate, or “above attribution”, view of performance as well as a drill-down view of performance by activity is something we are uniquely positioned to provide. This allows flexibility in how organizations start to tackle measuring performance. Organizations can start top-down or bottoms-up but ultimately marry them both up to get that full view of performance at all levels.
Difference #4: Allocadia is Platform-Agnostic
Unlike many other ROI and attribution vendors, Allocadia’s attribution engine isn’t tied to a specific CRM or automation system. Rather, it is platform-agnostic, and can pull in revenue metrics from Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, SugarCRM and Microsoft Dynamics for example.
With the addition of the attribution engine to Allocadia’s Marketing Performance Management solution, marketing leaders gain another layer of data to better understand what’s working, which teams are performing and what’s providing the best ROI.
Want to learn more? Read Allocadia’s light-hearted view on attribution or check out the product features.
The post How Allocadia Does Marketing Attribution Differently appeared first on Allocadia Marketing Performance Management.