• by Ray Schultz , May 24, 2018

Email plays a small role in B2B attribution — only 34% report marketing results from their email platform, compared with 52% that perform manual reporting with Excel spreadsheets, according to the 2018 Marketing Measurement & Attribution Survey Report by DemandGen, sponsored by BrightFunnel.

But email is part of a larger problem — that of cross-channel attribution.

B2B marketers face several challenges. The biggest one is tracking activity between specific buyer stages, cited by 48%. And 47% say they have trouble measuring the impact across channels and campaigns.

At the same time, 70% say they are trying for deeper metrics, with 25% specifying specific investments by channel. And 21% want to measure the specific impact of their content marketing spend. Slightly smaller percentages want to track the stages and velocity of the funnel.

Overall, B2B marketers do not give themselves high grades in attribution. Of those surveyed, 58% say they are lagging.

Breaking it down, 40% say their measurement skills need improvement, 14% say their efforts are poor or inadequate and 5% say they are not performing any measurement. Another 34% consider their abilities to be average, and 7% describe them as excellent.

Within their organizations, 63% report their results based on web analytics, and 54% from a marketing automation system.

The most measured metric is closed/won deals (48%).

B2B marketers are also trying to gain insights into pipeline opportunity, deal size, pipeline velocity and profit margin.

At the same time, 45% say they are not measuring marketing in the middle of the funnel. At the same time, 35% measure lead conversion from MQL to S!L to opportunities and closed/won. Only 20% are performing multi-touch attribution on multiple channels.

On a more positive note, 48% plan to have measurement tools in place for their account-based marketing programs within the next year.

DemandGen surveyed 283 B2B marketing executives in the U.S.