– Attribution is not a reliable measure of success in converting customers.
– The percentage of conversions depends on the customer’s buying timeline and intent.
– Understanding the quality of the audience and improving the customer journey is more important than focusing on attribution.Focus on understanding the factors that make customers more likely to convert and improve the customer journey on your website to cater to their needs and questions.Attribution doesn’t matter. The great myth about attribution is tied to the notion that you have an amazing customer journey on your website as it stands and it’s completely optimized to convert the most amount of people. THIS IS FALSE. In the history of the world, I can’t think of one situation where everyone converts. So let’s set realistic expectations. If you have the best customer journey in the world, it’s fully optimized, you have all the appropriate product information, you have a clean layout, great images and photos, and a bulletproof benefit and clear use case, what percentage should you convert? It’s a trick question; it depends on the customer’s buying timeline. I shoot for 10%. I’m happy with 6% (This is for first-time shoppers and doesn’t include blended with return customers). If it’s less than this, then it’s a quality of audience and offer issue. Here’s how we know this. We ask on all our forms: When are you looking to upgrade your [category]? Today, In a few days, In a few weeks, In a few months. Did you know that people that fill out our forms and say they are looking to make a purchase “today” convert at a rate of 39.3%? But those that said, in a few days, in a few weeks, or in a few months convert on average around 18% across all of them? Your attribution software isn’t telling you this; it’s not telling you what percentage of people coming from a source is saying “Today” so they are basing all their assumptions on non-statistical relationships centered around a return on ad spend. So wait, let me get this straight, all attribution tools don’t actually take into account intent data that is known to directly impact conversion rates, rendering most of their assumptions complete guesses not based on qualitative data? Yup. This is why I don’t care about attribution in the way it’s currently measured. If you can’t tell the quality of the audience, how can you know if something is actually working or not? You’re not supposed to convert everyone, but you are supposed to convert those that have the highest intent to making a purchase. If you’re not converting those people, then you have room for improvement in the customer journey. So in most cases, attribution is a waste of time. We spend so much time focused on ad spend and attribution when that time would be better spent looking at data, understanding what factors of a customer make them more likely to convert, talking to those customers through our ads and making sure that our website answers all of those questions they might have in a way that’s easy to understand. I just provided you an example where two people that showed equal amounts of interest in getting a coupon code convert at rates that differ by more than 20%. Let that sink in. This is why Formtoro incorporates this data into our ad spend reporting and breaks answers down by source and why I don’t care about attribution.It lacks context without intent data. #data #ecommerce #marketinghttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco