The role of the chief marketing officer (CMO) has been increasingly scrutinized in recent years. Dozens of CMO positions have been axed from some of the world’s most recognizable brands, including McDonald’s which replaced the role with a new SVP marketing technology position. CMOs who remain will need to prepare to handle even more pressure to prove their organizational value in 2020, says a new Forrester report.

In 2018 Forrester predicted a decline in Fortune 100 CMOs. Since then, organizations have started to part ways with CMOs, reallocating their responsibilities to leaders such as the CIO. 2020 is predicted to be a critical year for CMOs to deliver seamless customer experiences with their martech investments and, crucially, generate attributable revenue from those martech-enabled experiences. 

Martech spend continues to take a solid chunk out of CMOs’ budgets, and while spending slowed this year, the report warns that CMOs approach martech investments cautiously — and more strategically. “Rather than blindly dumping more money into tech spend, we’ve delivered growth with a strategy built around creative engagement with our customers through existing channels,” Chris Brandt, CMO of Chipotle told Forrester.

When marketers bring in leads, but no one measures attribution, how do you know which efforts are working? Check out the infographic to learn what you need to know about marketing measurement.

1. Asked to identify the top organisational goals for the business, companies expect their marketers to grow revenues (20.75 per cent), acquire new customers (20.6 per cent), and improve the customer experience (17.9 per cent), as their top priorities.

2. Marketers are investing in programs to better demonstrate the value of their work. However, these are often unsophisticated. 

3. As such, marketing is still poorly perceived by its management peers. Barely 15 per cent of respondents said their peers saw marketing as a primary business driver and revenue generator. 

4. Marketing technology has made huge strides improving the lot of CMOs over the past decade, and most companies have made investments across a range of disciplines. The top five functions identified by marketers in the survey were CRM, Social Media Engagement, Email Marketing Platforms, Marketing Automation, and Data Management.

5. As to their own goals, marketers want to build a bigger personal profile (interestingly, in the deep dive this was partly motivated by wanting to demonstrate the value of thought leadership to their peers). They also aspire to taking a larger role in business strategy and see gaining additional skills and capabilities as key to this.

Linear. The simplest Multi-Source Attribution model, linear attribution gives equal weight and revenue credit to all touchpoints.

Time decay. The lengthier the sales cycle (think B2B), the more spread out the touchpoints. The time decay model gives credit to more recent marketing touchpoints as opposed to those earlier in the process, which may not have been as impactful.

U-shaped. The U-shaped MTA model gives credit to two key touchpoints — the first touch and the lead creation — and any in between. Forty percent of the credit goes to the first touch and 40% goes to lead creation, while the remaining 20% is divided between any touches that occurred in the middle.

W-shaped. This model is the same as U-shaped MTA, except it includes an additional touchpoint — the opportunity creation. All three touchpoints receive 30% of the credit, while the remaining middle touches share 10%.

Full path. Full path attribution builds on the W-shaped model, including the final close. Basically, the bulk of the credit is given to the major milestones of the customer journey, but lower weight is also assigned to the touchpoints in between. One of the biggest benefits of this model is that it accounts for the sales team’s post-opportunity follow-up interactions, giving them the same weight as early-stage marketing activities.

Custom. Of course, there is an option to assign your own attribution weights through a custom model. 

Marketing feels they’re not getting recognition for their achievements. Finance sees marketing as an endless cost centre. This is not an easy fix. Forrester research shows 78% of respondents agree that marketing-finance alignment is vitally important, but only 15% feel that the two departments currently work together towards shared goals. At the very core of this rift is an inability to measure the impact of marketing in wider financial terms. That’s where predictive marketing analytics steps in.

Advanced predictive creates a centralised metric that brings marketing and finance onto the same page: Customer lifetime value (CLV) which represents predicted lifetime revenue in quantitative financial terms.

CLV allows marketing to see which accounts are most worth targeting so it can better focus its efforts, and in turn build a better business case for reinvestment; and finance can see exactly where revenue is coming from, through a clear, centralised dashboard.

Finance executives get complete future-based oversight of marketing performance towards tangible financial goals – so they can make better decisions about the wider business.

They’re more likely to improve returns than other technologies

A key part of proving digital marketing ROI is to measure the key metric over time, both before and after your effort, using a regular sample of the data or a time series. The reason you need a time series for proving digital marketing ROI is that it will allow you to illustrate that your actions had a material and lasting impact on a key metric.

Additionally, you should also be able to show that your initiative did not have a negative impact on any other key metrics. That is, to prove ROI you also need to show that while you have increased conversion rates, you did not inadvertently lower the average value of the customer. Doing so would reduce, if not negate, your impact on revenue.

Data is still complex, but marketers are having an easier time with it

So now that you know you need to be tracking all elements in the buyer journey, what should you focus on first? Dayna outlined five key metrics to keep your eye on:

First touch attribution—what brings people into your funnel
Last-touch attribution—what converts people to become customers
Multi-touch attribution—what accelerates people through your funnel
Velocity—how fast a piece of content, a channel, or a campaign moves people through your funnel
Full account analysis—how everything adds up in order to determine the best path to sale

Econsultancy’s State of Marketing Attribution report, published in association with AdRoll, looks into the current adoption levels of marketing attribution.

Only 7.1 percent of marketers are truly satisfied with their organization’s marketing attribution efforts, according to a new economic trend report from the Data & Marketing Association (DMA) and the Winterberry Group.

Nearly a quarter of respondents (23.2 percent) said they were not satisfied with marketing attribution, while 39.3 percent said they were “somewhat” satisfied, and 21.4 percent said they were satisfied.

Interest in marketing attribution has increased over the last year for 62.9% of respondents to the DMA survey, conducted in June. Over half of those surveyed (54.9 percent) cited attribution as a top of mind focus for their organization.

If you are similar to most people, it’s likely you are using the default attribution model in Google Analytics, i.e. Last Interaction.
Just because it is the default option, that does not mean it’s the right one for you. In this article, we will tell you how to set up a Google Analytics attribution model and UTM parameters based on your product and the stage of your company.

Content marketing should engage, educate, or entertain, but more importantly, should elicit action. This is what separates content marketing from content publishing.

The goal is not to be good at content, but to be good at business using content. If your content marketing works, it should affect your audience enough to prompt a business-specific behavior. These behavioral actions are the conversions that we need to track in order to see that our content has moved a reader beyond just engagement.

Many desired conversions can be as high-value as lead generation, product purchases, or requests for information. But they can also come in the form of engagement micro-conversions – sharing content, engaging with additional content, exploring your site deeper. What matters is that there are always things you want your reader to do, even if only to continue reading. 

Chart of the Day: Many clients and agencies aren't using Martech tools for marketing attribution. Attribution isn't very glamorous. But it's critical to ev. Marketing topic(s):Media attribution. Advice by Robert Allen.

Google is putting out a new free marketing tool to help businesses and marketers process more data more easily, with the help of automation.

Called Google Attribution, the tool can help companies better target groups of consumers with content that appeals to them.

Instead of a marketer having to look separately at data from Google Analytics and advertising tools AdWords and DoubleClick, they can use Google Attribution to look at data from those tools together.

Analysis of that data is also automated, the goal being to show users more useful insights into why ads and marketing efforts are effective or not.

5 Key Tips for Choosing the Right Marketing Attribution Model for Your Business

• Create a customer journey map – brainstorm touchpoints, channels and interactions at each stage of the buying cycle.
• Models should answer the executive question – If I spend nothing will revenue go down? Will reps or a team or the division miss their number?
• Pay close attention to lead quality – this could mean the rate at which leads became active users, and the rates they became paying customers.
• Campaign objectives should be a key driver – a first-touch model could work for a branding campaign, whereas a time-decay model is better suited for a limited-time promotion.
• Be prepared to pivot – always test, iterate and be willing to optimize or completely change attribution models.

The biggest challenge in proving digital marketing ROI is tying social and content efforts to revenue, marketers say. See what they say about KPIs, leads, data & more in this study.

To access this tool and try it out for yourself, simply log in to your Google Analytics account and go to Conversions > Attribution > Model Comparison Tool in the sidebar. From here, you’ll want to choose at least one model (but you can compare up to three) via the dropdown menu.

If you don’t see any data here, you’ll want to make sure you have either e-commerce tracking and/or goal conversion tracking set up in Google Analytics

Now comes the fun part — selecting a default attribution model. You can keep it simple, by giving conversion “credit” to the first or last interaction point the customer had with your product, or you can spread it out to give equal conversion consideration to all the touch-points in a customer’s engagement with your brand.

It’s important that marketers understand the difference between ML and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the latter of which is – at this point – aspirational for marketing. Machine learning is a foundational aspect to AI, and you need to ensure the technology you purchase is implementing ML right.

Functioning properly, machine learning provides the algorithms that make machines smarter but keep in mind that a lot of these algorithms are commoditized – many products use them. It’s how they are used in combination that often differentiates a solution from others. 

There’s a reason ML is used for attribution – it helps improve the accuracy of the analysis. Consider the amount of historical data you need to analyze; no human can accurately analyze all that data and come back with realistic insights. The same for predictive analysis. And ML can learn as the data grows.

Intelligence tools are one part of the marketing stack, and that can make it challenging to do attribution and other analysis. This is starting to change. 

While multi-touch attribution is the most accurate approach to demonstrating content marketing ROI, there’s a simpler metric that can get you started: leads influenced.

Leads influenced: The number of people who engaged with a piece of content and converted into a lead within the next 90 days.

Let’s look at an example. Say that I publish this post and 5,000 people read it. And amongst those 5,000 people, 65 become a lead for Contently in the next 90 days—they fill out a demo request form, request to talk to a sales person, download an e-book, or some other conversion event. Then, that piece of content would have 65 leads influenced.

This metric is an easy way to show the impact that content has on the top of your funnel and can be tracked with a simple conversion pixel placed on various conversion event points, like the aforementioned demo request form or e-book download. It’s one of the metrics that we bake right into our analytics platform, and helps us optimize our distribution strategy to ensure that content pieces that generate a lot of leads get prioritized in both our paid and organic campaigns.