Today’s CMO occupies a challenging and dynamic place in his or her organization’s ecosystem. He is accountable to the CEO for producing results – whether these results are leads, sales, brand equity or a combination – that help achieve the company’s business goals. He partners with the CRO (chief revenue officer) to implement programs that fuel the sales organization’s pipeline and empower it to close business. He is accountable to the CFO for producing those results at an acceptable cost, and must justify future budget spending based on past and predicted performance. And he manages a team that’s responsible for implementing a veritable Rubik’s cube of marketing channels, campaigns and tactics designed to produce the results that his C-suite colleagues are expecting. For these reasons, marketing attribution should be the CMO's best friend. Back Up Just a Half-Step In today’s multichannel, multi-touch marketing environment, marketers almost universally acknowledge that measuring success – and optimizing future spend – based on giving full conversion credit to the last touch or last act experienced by a prospect before converting is a highly flawed, inaccurate methodology. And most advertisers are coming to realize that subjective, rules-based methodologies for assigning credit – where the marketer simply picks an arbitrary percentage to assign to each touch based solely on its order within the conversion path – are also highly flawed. A rules-based methodology can actually be even less accurate than last touch, as it only accounts for position within the conversion chronology and doesn’t even consider the channel, creative, size, publisher, or any other attribute of those touches that can have significant impact on producing the conversion. In contrast, algorithmic attribution gathers and analyzes every attribute of each touchpoint experienced by all prospects across all channels to produce a customized model. These models examine every attributes and touchpoints combination to identify the lift in conversion produced by every touch experienced by every prospect. It then recalculates the organization’s success metrics based on the ACTUAL impact of every touchpoint. Although marketers tend to reject the first two methodologies, they intuitively tend buy into the validity of the algorithmic attribution methodology. That’s Where the Friendship Starts Implementing and utilizing algorithmic attribution within a marketing organization provides the CMO with an ecosystem whose performance is much more accurately measured and predicted. As a result, it’s much easier for him to meet the needs of his C-suite colleagues, as well as to chart a strategic and tactical course for his marketing colleagues. Here are a few key deliverables of attribution on which this friendship is built: