• by Ray Schultz , November 8, 2019

Marketers may be getting better at creating campaigns. But they still need help in analyzing the results, according to Attribution Report: How Today’s Marketers Measure Campaign Performance, a study by CallRail.

The report notes that “reporting on the efficacy of those efforts is often tedious, time-consuming and slippery.”

CallRail surveyed 300 marketers and also reached out to 1,000 consumers.  

On the marketer side, 96% agree that attribution is critical to informing their decisions. In addition, most brands have established attribution capabilities for the most widely used touchpoints — perhaps unevenly.

For example, 71% have systems that support email attribution. However, online order-form submission measurement is the top choice, cited by 76%.

Third is social media (64%)  and fourth phone call tracking (57%).

In addition, 55% have attribution capabilities for online chat and 44% have capabilities for text messaging.

Despite these systems, 81% spend at least part of their marketing budget on ineffective tactics. Among their obstacles are:

Poor insight into which tactics are effective attribution capabilities — 36%

Lack of understanding of the audience — 24% 

Lack of proper technology — 17%

Inadequate marketing budget — 16% 

Lack of support across departments (i.e., IT, marketing, product management) — 8%

On the consumer side, phone calls are the most popular means of contacting a business for the first time — 72% of the high-value purchases say so and 61% of the low-value shoppers. And 91% are more likely to trust a firm if they can easily reach a person on the phone.

In contrast, email is preferred by only 8% for high-value transactions and 11% of low-value purchases. It is roughly tied with online chat and form submission.

The study concludes: “The few marketers who are able to seamlessly pull performance data into a single platform are keeping stakeholder skepticism at bay while optimizing campaigns with crucial insights — namely, which efforts are driving real revenue, and which aren’t.”