Why cookie consent impacts your marketing acquisition metrics?

According to latest CNIL (French Data Privacy regulation organization) study, 41% of online prospects are not giving their consent to be cookie tracked.

Most of the marketing automation software still rely on cookie to track your prospect and it can have a real impact on how your measure your paid marketing performances.

Let’s take an example with a campaign on which you spent $2,500.

When looking at results in your reporting you see the following data and expect that this campaign is not profitable.

However, when looking at it using Heeet cookieless tracking solution, results are totally different and could prevent you to stop campaigns that are truly profitable.

As you can see, cookie can have a major impact on your acquisition data and performances analysis. Make sure you are not relying on cookie to set up your online lead tracking.

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Why measuring marketing performances on first or last click is not working?

Let’s start with some definitions explaining what are first and last click attribution models.

First click attribution gives all credit to the first marketing touchpoint.
Last click attribution gives all credit to the last marketing touchpoint.

What are the downside of first/last click attribution models. Let’s start with a really straight forward quote from Neil Hoyne, Chief Strategist at Google.

“First-click attribution isn't worth it. I get it - it makes for a nice story that "this click brought someone to us," "awareness!," etc. But it's nonsense. That first click you're measuring? It's probably not the first time a customer found you. But for most brands, there were touch points before that "first click" was recorded.

The truth is that first click serving as an intro to your brand is a myth. It's just an arbitrary point in the middle of the journey.”

The initial click may place excessive importance on early interactions that do not necessarily result in immediate conversions. Conversely, the final click might underestimate the significance of channels that contribute to building long-term relationships. A multi-touch attribution model is frequently the most precise method for assessing marketing influence throughout the entire customer journey.

By looking at the example below you'll notice that most of the paid activities, the one you should build your ROI calculation on, are not monitored at all.

We met a customer who stopped a marketing campaign on a totally new channel since they were not seeing any new leads either on first or last touch level.

Suddenly they saw a drop in the number of leads on their website.
This is why multi attribution is so important.  

Here is how Heeet can help to get a clear understanding of channels, campaigns and media influence on your revenue.

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Are we measuring “dark social marketing” impact on acquisition and revenue?

Dark Social is quite a buzz word at the moment but what is it in reality and how it can impact your marketing strategy?

By definition, “Dark social is a simple term used by marketers to describe the web traffic that comes from popular modern distribution channels when it’s difficult to accurately track. These are places where B2B buyers are highly active, but the company will not have direct visibility of the impact.” (https://everyonesocial.com/blog/what-is-dark-social/)

Here are some examples of “dark social” activities:

- Someone talks about your product to someone else,
- Someone saw your product review on a review/comparison website,
- Someone shares/comments a Linkedin post of your company or one of your employee
- Someone heard your CEO during a podcast
- Someone saw you on stage during an event

We could also extend “dark social” activities to your inbound sales team sending connection requests to people on Linkedin.

There are many different types of dark social activities but it is usually super hard to measure them, so here are few things that could help.

- Use UTMs/Url Shortener tool when publishing company news on Social media,
- Do the same when you ask your employees to promote an article,
- Add a “How did you hear about us?” picklist on your website.

This last option is what’s called “Self Reported Attribution”, we strongly recommend you to also add a sort of sales validation in your CRM so your sales team can “validate” this self reported attribution but also give more contextual information.

When using Heeet, you can customize your attribution model to reflect “self reporting influence”.

On lead generation you’ll be able to see how self reported attribution is counting against other digital interactions.

While on revenue, you’ll be able to see Self Reported influence based on your attribution settings.

Are we measuring “post acquisition” marketing activities?

When you have a long sales cycle you will hopefully engage with your prospect with some marketing content to shorten this cycle after this lead/opportunity was created in Salesforce.

Pre Acquisition activities are all the activities happening before the record is created in Salesforce.

Post Acquisition activities are all the activities happening after the record is created in Salesforce.

White paper, Webinar invite, Conference, New Feature email,….there are many different ways to engage with prospects during sales process but are you evaluating how those “post acquisition” activities are influencing your revenue?

We already saw above why first and last click attribution is missing a lot of insightful data but what about measuring “pre acquisition” only?

Imagine someone who clicked on a social post on Linkedin, leaves your site, comes back from an external link, and finally fills a form from direct traffic before being converted into a 1K$ opportunity. Then, during sales process, this prospect comes back from direct traffic, is exposed to a Google Ads campaign promoting a white paper (tailored to converted lead thanks to Heeet audiences sync with Google Ads 😉 and finally download this white paper from SEO visit.

Is your marketing team able to see how each channels (direct, SEA and SEO) and each content also played a role during sales process?

With Heeet, you can see exactly how “post acquisition” influence your revenue based on your attribution model settings in Salesforce.

Are we separating marketing driven VS sales driven acquisition costs and interactions?

CAC is great but it implies that all customers are equals, all being exposed both to marketing and sales activities.

However, in real life, some prospects will be exposed to your marketing campaigns, some will not. Some will require a lot of pre sales meetings some others will require less time, some will take most of the buying journey themselves.

Using Heeet, you can clearly see how many marketing and sales driven interactions happen during the sales process, enabling you to calculate accurately how much it trully cost to acquire a specific customer from a marketing and sales perspective.

And because your customer will still consume your marketing contents after initial purchase, Heeet will also automatically store any costs related to sales/cs/support and marketing activities.