Whitepaper: Customer-driven Online Engagement

Issues with sales attribution

A challenge related to this is proper sales attribution. Over the last few years, the Internet has become the principal starting point for people looking to educate themselves about a product before deciding to make a purchase either online or offline. According to market research, back in 2008 two-thirds of all people looking for financial services such as a mortgage, a credit card or a loan were already using the Internet as the first step to evaluate various options10. Particularly for more complex or expensive products and services, a multi-step, multi-channel purchase process is very common. This makes correct sales attribution difficult. Only if you as marketer know which path your customers followed in closing their deals, can you try to guide prospective buyers taking the same route. If you can attribute a sale to specific sites or channels, you can make well-founded decisions on how to spend your marketing dollars across all channels. On top of that, proper sales attribution significantly supports marketing departments in their annual budget discussions; after all it‟s not only the sales department who closed the deal…

Proper sales attribution requires a much deeper insight in your customer‟s whereabouts. Sometimes this can be solved for those customers who exclusively use the sites that are wholly owned by the marketing team, but it can become quite complex if you want to monitor a customer across different brands or departments. Obviously, this lack of shared customer information is counterproductive to overall company strategy, as there will be little synergy between channels and between departments. The company is sitting on top of a wealth of customer-related information but this information is only fractionally used, if at all.

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