Provable Marketing Attribution is a Boondoggle; Trust Your Gut Instead
Rand Fishkin
SparkToro
・
4 Apr 2022
If you employ an extensive, expensive, difficult-to-configure combination of tools, tracking systems, and deeply talented statistics professionals, you can build a high-quality, predictive attribution modeling structure that approximates reality with relatively minor gaps.
Don’t bother. Trust your gut.
The Only Catch: You Need a Trustworthy Gut
Having a list of channels and tactics that seem to be working, and that you continually invest in
- Have a secondary list of experimental channels/tactics where you’re investing until you prove a hypothesis
- Fundamentally understand your customers’ top of funnel behavior
- Keep track of enough analytics to be able to spot a disaster
- Trust your gut instincts
- You can get better results by trusting your gut and doing the work
The $1M Question: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?
If you knew with absolute certainty that two paying customers signed up as a nearly direct result of a how-to video posted on LinkedIn, what would you do differently in your marketing? What if your perfect tracking system proved that zero paying customers came from that LinkedIn post? Are you changing something then?
The Case for “Trust Your Gut” Investments
Non-attributable sources of marketing are lower in competition, and more powerful in impact
- Channels with “provable” ROI are almost always claiming credit for channels whose attribution can’t be shown
- Marketers who flip the script and shut down “provable” channels often see an attribution shift but no loss in conversions
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