When you enter the world of digital marketing, one thing becomes increasingly clear: Data and analytics are king. Podcast marketing and advertising are especially great ways to reach your target audience, but unfortunately, the analytics aren’t quite up to par with other forms of advertising. This is especially the case when it comes to marketing attribution data.
So, what do you do to combat the challenges of podcast marketing attribution? What are these challenges? Also…what is marketing attribution in the first place? Let’s talk about it.
What Is Marketing Attribution, and Why Is It Important?
First, let’s get a refresher on marketing attribution and why it helps. In short, marketing attribution gives businesses a clearer picture of their return on investment — or ROI — for their advertising efforts. It does this by identifying the important touchpoints in the customer’s journey to buying your product or service. In other words, it tells marketers how their product was found and what led to the customer buying it.
Marketing attribution is essential because the customer journey is no longer as straightforward and cut and dry as it was before the digital era. Before digital marketing and advertising, people found your business through word of mouth, walking or driving by the store or from commercials and news ads. With digital marketing, there is a vast array of different methods and touchpoints that could lead a customer to your website. With proper marketing attribution, you can find out which of these touchpoints provides the biggest ROI and funnel your efforts more toward these touchpoints. Ideally, you’d have detailed, precise data of your marketing attribution showing you exactly where all of your customers come from. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. Let’s take a look at why this is.
What Are the Major Challenges?
As with anything in digital marketing, marketing attribution — specifically podcast marketing attribution — comes with various challenges that are sometimes difficult for marketers to overcome. Here are a few of the major challenges that you’ll face with podcast attribution.
Assigning the Credit: The first big hurdle is knowing how to credit your touchpoints and which ones are leading to your conversion or key performance indicators. Let’s say you are running a full digital marketing strategy. You use podcast advertising, Google Ads, social media, SEO and more. A customer ends up buying your product through these efforts. They first heard about your product on their favorite podcast. They also happened to see an Instagram ad of yours pop up on their timelines. Later, they read a blog that mentions your product. They make a note about it and they visit your website later to finally buy the product. So which of these gets the credit? Was it the podcast for making them aware of your brand? Was it the Instagram ad reminding them of your product? It’s hard to tell. This is why attribution can get messy. This is also where attribution models come in.
Choosing the Right Attribution Model: In order to properly assign attribution credit, you need to use an attribution model. But these models are imperfect, and using the wrong one could lead to you having less than great attribution data. There are first-touch models, last-touch models, linear models, time decay models, U-shaped models, multi-touch models and more. Choosing the right one will depend on your goals, the type of sales cycle you have and a multitude of other factors.
It Takes Time and Effort: Finally, it takes a lot of effort, time and dedication to make the most of your attribution data. Many times, with advertising and marketing data, you want to be able to just look at the raw analytics, find what you’re looking for and make decisions based on what is available. With attribution data, you’ll have to put in the time to test your model and wait for the data to build up to get a clear picture of your ROI and your best touchpoints. That being said, the time you put into it will be worth it if you go about it the right way.
What Makes Attribution Difficult?
All of these factors make attribution a tough nut to crack. It doesn’t help that platforms like Google Analytics aren’t especially geared toward providing good attribution data from all of your advertising channels. You need to use your own model and put it into action. You also have to put in the time and effort. The frustration of using the wrong model and putting too much time into figuring out attribution can make it difficult for many companies. But if you’re able to put together a model that works and figure out attribution for your sales cycle, you can definitely increase your ROI and find the best channels of advertising for your business.
Marketing Attribution With Backtracks
As far as podcast advertising attribution goes, there is a great solution available. Backtracks provides incredibly advanced podcast analytics that no other platform can match — including podcast attribution. It may be difficult to get accurate attribution data for all of your channels, but you can rely on Backtracks to help get your podcast attribution under control. Sign up with Backtracks today and contact us for more information.
