As a business that generates traffic through affiliate marketing, you strive to maximize the return on every dollar. However, given the diversity of marketing channels, measuring the publisher’s revenue impact, especially for first-touch interactions, remains a serious challenge.
And although web analytics helps with it, it won’t take you far without lead attribution, the process of tying your leads to touchpoints and marketing efforts that drive conversions. Not only does it provide actionable marketing data, but it also enables you to measure and optimize the performance of your affiliates – something that pays off greatly in the long run.
Read on to discover lead attribution and how to apply it to your business to replace guesswork with data-driven decisions.
What Is Lead Attribution?
Lead attribution is a performance marketing practice that enables advertisers to evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and credit touchpoints based on their contribution to conversions.
Here’s what data lead attribution reveals:
- Channel data: Channel (paid traffic, social media, email), platform (Google Ads, Facebook, blog), and the campaign or keyword that generated a conversion.
- Time and sequence data: Interaction time, the position of the touchpoint in the journey, and the duration between the current and previous touchpoints.
- Content data: The content type (demo request form, blog post, whitepaper) and the specific page a user viewed.
- Conversion data: Funnel stage at which lead converted, the projected revenue per lead, and the time between the first touchpoint and conversion.
Marketing vs. lead attribution? The former captures the performance of your marketing ecosystem, while the latter zooms in on specific user actions that lead to a conversion – the data that matters most in performance marketing.
Caller Attribution
If your business relies on pay-per-call instead of web lead campaigns, you need caller attribution. It tracks the performance of specific campaigns and marketing channels through tracking numbers, which you can reserve in Phonexa’s tracking pool and leverage with Call Logic.
Call Logic comes with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and AI Call Agents that automatically process and qualify inbound calls, enhancing your call-handling capabilities.
| “As long as you’re tracking your calls in the same way that you track your web leads in terms of attributing value back to all of your media buying platforms, whether it be your social media platforms or Google or wherever you’re doing, let the algorithm do its thing and go away. Allowing the algorithm to target customers is valuable for you. A lot of people will track every little last thing out of their web leads to make sure they’re optimizing their advertising spend, but they don’t do it for calls. So I think calls are getting treated maybe unfairly, not being tracked to the same level. You’re just not letting the platforms do their thing.” – David Pickard, CEO, Phonexa, during the Pioneering Pay-Per-Call Excellence webinar |
See how Call Logic helps you manage your calls:
Get started with Phonexa’s Call Logic and turn more calls into revenue opportunities.
Benefits of Lead Attribution
Simplify Affiliate Crediting
Lead attribution helps you stay on top of your lead sources by assigning a unique ID to each lead. It enables quick and error-free touchpoint crediting, which is particularly beneficial when partnering with numerous affiliates.
Inform Your Affiliates
By reporting lead data to your affiliates, you provide them with valuable insights for personalizing their marketing campaigns.
Automation tip: To streamline reporting, consider using postback URLs to send lead details to an affiliate tracking system whenever a click occurs.
Enhance Your Marketing & UX Efforts
Lead attribution data is useful not only for affiliates but also for your marketing and UX teams:
- UX designers shift focus to the most effective marketing channels to maximize your traffic and conversions.
- Marketers calibrate their tone of voice and rethink banner, link, and form placements based on proof-of-effectiveness data.
You can leverage lead data even more effectively by analyzing its shifts and trends. Knowing how your audience’s preferences evolve allows you to put your strategies on the right track, at the right time.
Grow ROI in the Long-Term
With lead source attribution data, you reveal the most effective combinations of channels and communication:
- Banner placements for blog posts
- Forms for emails
- Tone of voice for social media
This data helps you tune your marketing strategy to the long-term ROI growth and open new scaling opportunities.
Prevent Budget Wasting
Given that cross-channel campaigns deliver a 13% higher return on ad spend than siloed approaches, businesses tend to tap into as many channels as possible. However, it’s often ineffective, especially when there’s no data behind it. Instead, you should test the ground by measuring channel engagement and conversions with lead attribution – make the next move only if the results meet the projected values.
Types of Lead Attribution
First-Touch
The first-touch lead attribution model is ideal for those who view the top of the funnel as a pivotal stage in their customer journey. This model focuses on the first user-to-brand interaction, highlighting how exactly they become aware of your offer.
Imagine you have an extended customer journey, encompassing paid ads and blog posts at the top of the funnel, email campaigns in the middle, and webinars and product demos at the bottom.
First-touch lead attribution will only reveal what paid ad or blog post a user interacted with, without taking into account what happened next.
Last-Touch
On the other hand, there’s a last-touch attribution that focuses on events at the bottom of the funnel. It captures the final user’s interaction with your brand, which, referring to the previous example, can be a product demo or webinar.
Last-touch lead attribution is the best option for businesses with short sales cycles. As their audience often converts into customers impulsively, they should identify and optimize the final marketing touchpoints for the best performance.
Multi-Touch
Multi-touch is the most comprehensive lead attribution type, gathering data and crediting multiple touchpoints.
It comes in several types:
| Type | Description | Crediting |
| Linear | Linear model equally credits all touchpoints | Distribute 100% equally across all touchpoints |
| Time-Decay | Time-decay model credits interactions closer to the conversion | Gradually increase percentage values from the middle to the bottom of the funnel |
| U-Shaped | U-shaped model credits the first and last touchpoints | Assign 40% to the first and final interactions, and distribute 20% between other touchpoints |
| W-Shaped | W-shaped model credits the first, lead-generating, and sales touchpoints | Assign 30% to the first, mid-point, and final interactions, and distribute 10% between other touchpoints |
If you find these models a bit off, you can use custom attribution and speed it up with machine learning, automatically analyzing customer behavior and identifying the touchpoints that contribute the most toward a conversion or sale.
How To Implement & Use Lead Attribution
1. Map the Customer Journey
First and foremost, you should map your entire customer journey. Although you can do it through mind maps or whiteboards, the most convenient method is to use customer journey mapping tools, such as UX Pressia.
2. Select Attribution Model
Determine a goal, such as increasing your ROI or enhancing lead generation, and select an attribution model that helps you achieve it. For example, if you want to ramp up your sales, you may want to focus on the middle to the bottom of your funnel, which you can do with last-touch or time-decay attribution models.
3. Leverage Lead Attribution Software
You can launch lead attribution through these steps:
- Set up UTM parameters to track source, medium, and campaign
- Fire tracking codes across marketing touchpoints you need to track
- Integrate your CRM with your marketing automation platform and website analytics
To attribute leads without getting overwhelmed by technical configurations, you need a specialized lead management system, like Phonexa’s LMS Sync.
Here are a few other LMS Sync features:
- Lead distribution: Configure lead routing to improve lead flows and maximize conversions.
- Ping Tree: Automatically purchase leads by selecting your preferred parameters and the amount you’re willing to pay.
Book a demo to learn how LMS Sync and Call Logic can elevate your business by managing and validating your leads.
4. Analyze Data & Optimize Your Marketing
Use lead attribution data to measure the effectiveness of your channels and campaigns, and to identify opportunities for optimization or budget reallocation. As your business evolves, you may want to review the effectiveness of your lead attribution against emerging hurdles and consider switching to a more relevant model.
How To Use Lead Attribution for Marketing Optimization
Explore New Audiences
Venturing into new markets is stressful and puts your effort, time, and money at risk. However, by leveraging performance marketing – where you pay only for measurable results – tapping into new audiences becomes a safe bet.
Lead attribution, in turn, helps you measure the effectiveness of your endeavors. It reveals the traffic volumes generated by specific publishers and campaigns, as well as the readiness of this traffic to convert.
As a result of comprehensive tests, you gain insights into the behavioral tendencies of new audiences, which you can leverage for omnichannel personalization, a communication method preferred by 69% of customers.
Improve Lead Scoring
Lead scoring, an algorithm that assesses user intent, becomes even more granular and effective with data from lead attribution.
Lead attribution incorporates additional parameters into lead qualification, such as white paper downloads or demo requests, making your scores more data-driven. It’s much easier to identify someone’s intent when their interactions with your brand are recorded chronologically.
With lead attribution, you can also flag actions that don’t lead to sales. As you explore behaviors that precede drop-offs, you can recognize these signals.
Align Scoring with Sales Outcomes
By leveraging Phonexa’s predictive models, you can apply your historical attribution data to new leads and accurately identify the revenue they are likely to generate.
This information is particularly useful for call-reliant businesses. By exploring a lead’s predictive model, they can replicate proven conversion paths to increase the likelihood of sales.
At the same time, predictive models may identify leads unlikely to convert into customers, allowing you to shift your focus from dead-end to prospective opportunities.
Elevate Your Performance Marketing With Phonexa
Whether you generate web leads or callers, Phonexa’s core solutions will help you track and distribute them for seamless opportunity-to-sale conversions:
| LMS Sync |
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| Call Logic |
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These six features expand Phonexa’s core functionality:
All six work hand-in-hand with LMS Sync or Call Logic, so no more hopping between CRM systems and databases – just a smooth workflow that allows you to shift your focus from routine to business scaling.
| “We’ve seen a lot of people come to us and say, “Finally, I’ve got a trusted, transparent, virtuous process for running performance and partner marketing in one place, paying only for vetted outcomes.” They didn’t know it existed, or they knew it existed but in very bite-sized chunks.” – David Pickard, CEO, Phonexa, during the Affiliate Marketing Podcast With Lee-Ann Johnstone |
Explore Phonexa’s software in detail in this short video:
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does attribution help businesses do?
Lead attribution enables businesses to accurately credit customer touchpoints and refine marketing efforts by providing actionable insights into their campaigns.
How to track lead source
After you augment your links with UTM parameters, you must connect them to web analytics. By integrating this system with your CRM, you create an automated loop that feeds data on lead sources into your dashboard.
What’s the purpose of attribution tools?
Lead attribution tools allow you to automate the process and avoid manual data transfers between your web analytics and CRM systems. It saves time and allows you to shift your focus from routine to scaling.
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