Chasing full-funnel marketing attribution is a fool's errand

I was applying for a summer internship for a tech company and the marketing lead interviewing me just told me this.

My first thought was “Whoa, that’s so great!”

Boy, was I naive... 🤡

Today, carrying the experience of more than a decade (and a few battle scars), I’m not so bullish on the show ROI craze.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not an attempt to escape accountability or give marketers a free rein to be creative without an obligation to show their efforts lead to results.

But the improvements in tracking and attribution have made marketing so focussed short-sighted that most marketers today look like people who are stumbling in a dark room looking for a light switch that isn’t there.

The ROI Myopia

The problem with being able to track and attribute everything is that it creates a pervasive incentive to only do the things you can tie to results.

However, for all the leaps we’ve made in measurement and tracking, marketing attribution still relies on abstractions, or (as I prefer to call them) shortcuts.

We trade persuasion (unmeasurable) for conversion rate (as in the ratio between pageviews and signups on a piece of BOFU content). 

We attribute a sale to a single click on a retargeting ad even though there was a string of (mostly untraceable) touchpoints which preceded it.

Taken to an extreme, this can create comical situations. I once had a CEO ask me “Why do we need to create 10 pieces of content, when most signups come from 1?”

(If you’re not sure what’s wrong with this question, hit me up with a message and I’ll happily explain.)

But even with founders who are more attuned to how marketing works, it can be hard (bordering on impossible) to convince them to spend resources on tactics and channels which are not 100% trackable.

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Why is this a problem?

Remember the 95/5 rule:

Most companies (naturally) focus on these 5% – by optimizing for signups, trials, and ultimately revenue.

What this leads to resembles a pool of piranhas fighting for a scrap of food.

That’s why truly great marketers understand the importance of being top of mind.

They want to build awareness and trust with their audience while they’re still in the 95% part, so that once they switch to the 5% of actively looking, they are ahead.

The problem is that mindshare and top of mind are incredibly hard to measure.

Abstractions like brand awareness and share of voice are unreliable – i.e. hard to measure and, because of that, hard to trust.

That’s why so many tech companies underinvest in brand marketing and then wonder why later entrants overtake them. (Hint: it’s not just the VC money. It’s how you spend them.)

What to do instead?

If you’re a founder, the best you can do is to become tolerant of not having full control/visibility (scary, I know) over what your marketing team is doing. This comes in a package with trusting your people – this part is non-negotiable. 

If you’re a marketer, first you have to learn to have some very honest conversations with yourself. Trust is non-negotiable as I said above, but it’s also non-negotiable that you have to earn it.

You’d also have to be the first to admit when something has failed – often even before others have noticed.

But above all, you have to be constantly vigilant to find ways to bring more clarity and deeper understanding – including using new methods and technologies.

Often that will come with an added price of having to first learn how to use and then translate complicated concepts and tools (such as Marketing Mix Modeling) to laypeople.

The landscape is getting more sophisticated, you have to follow

Marketing is constantly evolving and becoming more technical.

But at the same time, the basics remain the same – you have to convince people to trust you with their money and their (professional) reputation.

This means you have to develop your sophistication as a marketer.

This means you need to hone your technical and data skills while still listening and connecting with people as a human being.

Perhaps the hardest part is finding the right level of tolerance – doing things you’re not able to track, but still being comfortable you’re on the right track.

This comes naturally to a few genius marketers. The rest of us, just need to keep trying…

Let’s have a discussion

Listen to Ilia Markov on the Spiky Growth podcast where we discuss “The ROI Myopia” in greater detail.