As new technologies, understanding of best practices, and industry regulations evolve over time, so do the trends surrounding marketing attribution within the e-commerce landscape. In this report we will explore this evolving landscape, emphasizing how it will help you achieve your business goals for the year 2024 and beyond. We dive deep into the top 3 business goals: sales and marketing alignment, understanding the customer journey, and proving return on investment (ROI). We will discuss the challenges that you will face in pursuing these goals, including issues with trust, changing customer preferences, and the impact of evolving privacy regulations. To solve these challenges, we will state our case on what marketing attribution model to use, and how you can effectively integrate AI and zero party data into your marketing strategy.
We are excited to share our findings, and to join you on your journey to better understanding your customers and to finding new marketing opportunities.
An important question to always ask is, why are we doing this in the first place? What high-level goals do these tools and practices around marketing attribution help us achieve? We believe those goals will connect in some strong way to increasing sales and lowering costs. What bottlenecks, though, do the industry believe to be the most impactful in pursuing these goals?
According to Ruler Analytics (https://www.ruleranalytics.com/blog/insight/marketing-attribution-stats/), the top 3 goals behind marketing attribution for marketers are:
1. Sales and marketing alignment
2. Understanding of the customer journey
3. Proving ROI
Let’s dive deeper into each one.
This comes in at first place as the main goal for 59.4% of marketers. LinkedIn (https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/marketing-solutions/cx/2020/images/pdfs/moments-of-trust-v4.pdf) also agrees, reporting that 85% of companies surveyed agree that sales and marketing alignment is the “largest opportunity for improving business performance today”. Of all the e-commerce surveys conducted on Gojiberry, marketing attribution post-purchase surveys are the most common at 27%. All these indicate the strong need for e-commerce businesses to align sales with marketing.
Let’s kick things off by defining what sales and marketing alignment is:
“Sales and marketing alignment … is the goal of enabling your sales and marketing teams to work with better communication, transparency and collaboration in order to achieve greater efficiency.”
- Source: https://www.ruleranalytics.com/blog/sales/sales-marketing-alignment/
For larger companies with dedicated salespeople and marketing people trying to work together, effectively communicating and collaborating is a challenge. Even for smaller companies where the salesperson and marketing person may in fact be the same person, it can be difficult to reconcile what sales opportunities came from what marketing efforts.
A study shared by HubSpot (https://blog.hubspot.com/agency/tools-data-complexity-marketing-technology) shows that better integration of existing marketing tools is their strongest need at 60.9%. For example, your sales’ CRM tool may be showing different numbers from your SNS marketing dashboard, which may be showing different numbers from your Google Analytics dashboard. In fact, on average companies use 12 different marketing tools. Now wonder your teams are arguing!
To further illustrate the challenges of building trust and alignment on what data your teams should share, MMA’s study (https://www.mmaglobal.com/matt/state-of-attribution) also shows that acceptance for attribution measurement from team members outside of marketing continues to be a high 64% “not satisfied”. For the marketers out there, it’s not your fault!! We don’t blame you 😢❤️🫂. We blame the tools that were available to you.
We’re not alone in blaming your MTA (multi-touch attribution) tools. Although on a slightly upward trend, NPS scores, which help you measure customer satisfaction, for these tools continue to be negative at -15% in 2023. We’ll dive deeper into where marketing attribution tools have been lacking, and what you can do about it in the best tools and practices section below.
Gone are the days when you can rely only on a vanity metric such as Reach. Reach is where you simply maximize the number of people who see your ads. This worked better when ad tracking and targeting were more accurate, effective, and cheap (more on this in the Proving ROI section). Now with marketers growing smarter by the day, we are learning that focusing on Outcomes is the smarter strategy as opposed to focusing on Reach. Outcomes are the metrics that matter to your business goals, such as increased sales and improved customer experience.
Improving Outcomes requires a strong understanding of your customer journey and where the bottlenecks are. Tracking your customer journey can be very challenging however, as your customer’s behavior and their decision making process is becoming increasingly complex. Consumers are increasingly tech-savvy, and their habits in researching products prior to purchase reflect that.
PwC’s Global Consumer Insights data (https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/consumer-markets/consumer-insights-survey.html) shows all the channels consumers check when doing their research. Search engines come in on top at 55%, while many other channels such as price comparison websites, SNS, retailer websites, customer reviews, word of mouth, and Amazon all hover right around ~30% each. The up and coming Gen Z demographic rely even more heavily on SNS for pre-purchase research at 44%. No wonder your consumers have so many touch points before making a purchase, and no wonder effectively attributing your marketing is so difficult!
The final goal we will cover for improving marketing attribution is to prove how much ROI you are getting for your marketing costs and efforts. First, are your various marketing initiatives even worth it? Second, how should you be allocating your marketing budget to optimize profit? Utilizing marketing attribution will help you answer these questions.
There’s just one problem… Privacy regulations and user preferences are becoming increasingly stricter, making it increasingly difficult to track your customer’s behaviors. For a quick history lesson on 3rd party cookies and how we got here:
Source: https://classic.qz.com/guide/the-end-of-third-party-cookies/
As Chrome accounts for over 66% of the web browser market as of 2024 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/268254/market-share-of-internet-browsers-worldwide-since-2009/ ), Chrome blocking 3rd party cookies is considered to be the “death of 3rd party cookies” 💀😭🪦. In other news, marketers were discovered to be slightly dramatic (just a smidgen).
In addition to the shifting regulatory landscape, we have the issue of an increasingly complex customer journey, as stated in the previous section. When “proving” where your purchase conversions should be attributed to, do you attribute it to the first thing your customer clicked? The last thing? What if it’s not even clickable (ie. word-of-mouth, a TV commercial, an influencer’s shout-out, etc.)!?
Don’t worry, we gotchu 🫵😏👍. All of that in the next best tools and practices section.
We have gone over what goals marketers are trying to achieve through marketing attribution, and the challenges surrounding them. Next, let’s go over what tools and practices will help you achieve those goals.
Let’s start by listing out some of the marketing attribution models out there:
Sources:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/attribution-reports-definition
https://www.ronsela.com/full-funnel-attribution/
Phew… You just want to be told which one’s best, you say? We hear you👂🫵. Leading up to 2024, the trends are favoring a combination of data-driven attribution and customer-driven attribution. Let’s dig into the rationale behind this.
Google sent a clear signal that data-driven attribution trumps all the simpler touchpoint reliant models. In the past, Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 allowed you to select which attribution model you preferred from a list including first-click, linear, time-decay, position-based, and finally data-driven attribution. Marketers quickly learned to trust the power of AI, leading to 97% choosing data-driven (never bring a knife to a gunfight). Google agreed this was best, and in June 2023 made it the only option.
AI is extremely powerful when you have the data. Assuming you have a good algorithm ready to go (ie. Google’s or Meta’s), it takes out all the guesswork. You can turn on your ads and be confident they will optimize to the best of their ability based on what you put in.
What if you don’t have the data? AI needs data almost as much as I need coffee (I’m trying to cut down). You may be an early stage e-commerce store that simply does not have a lot of it. Also, there is no data for what you are not tracking in the first place. Therefore, the AI won’t take into account things like word-of-mouth, offline touchpoints, marketing content that had an impact but weren’t clicked, and so on.
We have also been assuming you only rely on data from Google or Meta. How do you incorporate Shopify’s data, TikTok’s data, your PoS’s data, Salesforce’s data, Klaviyo’s data, and so on? Your data ecosystem is growing exponentially and becoming increasingly interconnected. ChatGPT and Gemini, amongst other AI platforms, are quickly making it easy to simply dump data in to get answers out. As of early 2024 though, effective data mapping and automated integrations are still the limiting factor.
Sources:
https://neilpatel.com/blog/data-driven-attribution/
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/13427716
For all the problems we discussed about 3rd party data in the Proving ROI section, many can be solved with zero party data. Let’s compare the definitions of 3rd party data, 1st party data, and zero party data to get us all on the same page:
From your customer’s perspectives, it is clear which one of these they prefer. 61% of consumers don’t trust the 3rd party cookies tracking their behaviors. On the other hand, 91% of consumers will gladly give their personal and preference data in return for loyalty rewards (https://grow.cheetahdigital.com/ebook/the-zero-party-data-playbook-2023/). In our digital world where trust is a fleeting asset, being transparent and direct goes a very long way, and the numbers prove it. Your customers aren’t just willing to answer your questions, but actually prefer it when it leads to more personalized experiences with your brand.
Zero party data is very reliable, since it comes directly from your customers. For all the scenarios you can’t track with data-driven methods such as word-of-mouth, you can simply ask your customers where they discovered you. For all the marketing channels and platforms whose data you’re trying to reconcile, at the end of the day your customer’s experience is what matters. Again, just ask them! Implementing this solution is extremely simple - as easy as installing the customer insights Shopify app, Gojiberry, and turning on our marketing attribution template survey. After that, it’s simply a matter of waiting for your results to come in while you work on other parts of your business.
Since zero party data comes directly from your customers answering your questions, it can take more time to gather enough data. Also, you need to understand how to avoid bias from affecting your results. This is where choosing the right tools becomes important. Gojiberry’s surveys are designed with your customer’s in mind, resulting in an industry leading response rate of up to 50%. In addition, our in-app guidance and survey templates will help you understand things such as what questions to ask, and how much incentive to give to increase your response rate without biasing your results.
The answer to which attribution model is best is not a “us vs them” situation - it’s a “we’re stronger together” situation 🤝👩❤️👨💪.
AI and data-driven attribution is powerful when it comes to optimizing the marketing channels where data is available. If you run ads on Google or Instagram for example, you should absolutely be using their built-in data-driven attribution models. Zero party data and customer-driven attribution will help you understand overall where your customers are coming from, including where your web analytics tools can’t reach. Another way to look at it is, customer-driven attribution will give you a bird’s-eye-view to help you plan your strategy, and data-driven attribution will help you execute that strategy more efficiently. Therefore, when planning your general budget we recommend relying on customer-driven attributed data. When executing your specific budget per campaign, use data-driven attributed data, where possible.
Let’s reflect on where e-commerce customers came from last year in 2023, so you can have some benchmarks to compare your own data with. We will focus on English speaking sites and Japanese speaking sites, and compare the two.
We can see comparing the English speaking market versus the Japanese speaking market, it seems the English speaking market has a stronger focus on search engines, and the Japanese market on social media. Interestingly, Japan seems to be a bit slow on utilizing TikTok as a sales channel. Comparing TikTok’s penetration in the US market of 44% of the population (https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/21/tiktok-ceo-takes-to-the-app-to-announce-companys-more-than-150m-active-users-in-the-u-s/) vs Japan market of 17% (https://humblebunny.com/japan-top-social-media-networks/), you would expect a difference in these attribution numbers. As young TikTok users age and as TikTok gains more market share in Japan, we imagine this number will grow. We look forward to checking our predictions in next year's report!
As we march forward into 2024, this report hopes to serve as a strategic guide, urging marketers to embrace a collaborative strategy that optimizes both overarching planning and campaign-specific execution. Technological changes are not slowing down. We must adapt, integrate, and propel e-commerce strategies to capture these exciting opportunities.
Gojiberry’s vision is to help you uncover these revelations through human insights. Install the Gojiberry app on your Shopify store, and find out what marketing channels your customers are coming from, starting today.
Reach out to us at contact@gojiberry.app, and let us know how we can help you achieve your business goals for 2024 and beyond!
Download Gojiberry to improve your business
