Full Circle Insights is taking the mystery out of advertising. The firm launched Full Circle Campaign Attribution, an app made to work inside Salesforce’s CRM suite, revealing how B2B ad campaigns generate leads and sales.
B2B advertising can be frustrating to quantify. While marketing people will craft online ad campaigns, what goes unknown is which portion of the ad campaign generates the most leads and the most sales. According to SiriusDecisions, a B2B market research firm, about a third of all B2B firms are using some form of attribution software, and that should climb up to half of all B2B firms in two years.
In a typical B2B world, marketers develop ad campaigns to find leads, which are then passed on to the sales team. They have to work together and share information. “The key issue is if you have two departments working together and have different information, it is really hard for them to work together,” said Bonnie Crater, president and CEO of Full Circle Insights. “Data acts differently in marketing automation than in Salesforce.” What should be an apples-to- apples comparison becomes as easy as oranges-to- coconuts.
By keeping Campaign Attribution inside Salesforce, “sales and marketing all see the same information,” Crater said. Salesforce is the system of record for many companies, she noted. Keying off this app allows different sales and marketing teams to work together. All the results are present and comparable. Marketers would try to keep track of “lead counts” to measure the impact of an ad campaign, but not every lead turned into a sale. Where Campaign Attribution lives up to its name is the way it looks at “touches”–every instant a prospective sale looks or interacts with marketing content. The app can track the “first touch” or the “last touch” that a client makes when he responds to ad material.
But that single touch picture is also incomplete, Crater said. If a $60,000 sale is booked based on first-touch data only, “then all $60,000 goes to the first touch,” Crater said. That can be misleading, since it can take five or 10 “touches” to convert a lead into a sale, she explained.
With Campaign Attribution, all those touches can be logged and measured. Emerging from this is the concept of the “tipping point”–the touch that gets the client to engage with the sales team. With each touch quantified, marketers know which step in the ad campaign yielded the best results.
Marketers can also assign weights to each step in the ad campaign, based on how they assess their business. Some may assign greater weight to a prospect attending a conference, while others might consider it more noteworthy if a prospect read a white paper. “We know not all touches are equal,” Crater said. “Different companies have different needs for attribution.”
Another tool included in Campaign Attribution is Deal Explorer, which allows users to look at one deal at a time. That information can complement the tracking done by Campaign Attribution to see how that customer was acquired.
Currently, Campaign Attribution has three out-of- the-box models and an API that allows users to craft their own models as well, Crater said.
