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• Marketing Touchpoints : Examples, KPIs, and Best Practices

  11 mars 2024, par Erin

  The customer journey is rarely straightforward. Rather, each stage comprises numerous points of contact with your brand, known as marketing touchpoints. And each touchpoint is equally important to the customer experience. 

  This article will explore marketing touchpoints in detail, including how to analyse them with attribution models and which KPIs to track. It will also share tips on incorporating these touchpoints into your marketing strategy. 

  What are marketing touchpoints ? 

  Marketing touchpoints are the interactions that take place between brands and customers throughout the latter’s journey, either online or in person. 

  

  By understanding how customers interact with your brand before, during and after a purchase, you can identify the channels that contribute to starting, driving and closing buyer journeys. Not only that, but you’ll also learn how to optimise the customer experience. This can also help you : 

  • Promote customer loyalty through increased customer satisfaction
  • Improve your brand reputation and foster a more positive perception of your brand, supported by social proof 
  • Build brand awareness among prospective customers 
  • Reconnect with current customers to drive repeat business

  According to a 2023 survey, social media and video-sharing platforms are the leading digital touchpoints among US consumers.

  

  With the customer journey divided into three stages — awareness, consideration, and decision — we can group these interactions into three touchpoint segments, depending on whether they occur before, during or after a purchase. 

  Touchpoints before a purchase

  Touchpoints before a purchase are those initial interactions between potential customers and brands that occur during the awareness stage — before they’ve made a purchase decision. 

  Here are some key touchpoints at the pre-purchase stage : 

  • Customer reviews, forums, and testimonials 
  • Social media posts
  • Online ads 
  • Company events and product demos
  • Other digital touchpoints, like video content, blog posts, or infographics
  • Peer referral 

  In PwC’s 2024 Global Consumer Insights Pulse Survey, 54% of consumers listed search engines as their primary source of pre-purchase information, followed by Amazon (35%) and retailer websites (33%). 

  Here are the survey’s findings in Western Europe, specifically : 

  

  Social channels are another major pre-purchase touchpoint ; 25% of social media users aged 18 to 44 have made a purchase through a social media app over the past three months. 

  Touchpoints during a purchase

  Touchpoints during a purchase occur when the prospective customer has made their purchase decision. It’s the beginning of a (hopefully) lasting relationship with them. 

  It’s important to involve both marketing and sales teams here — and to keep track of conversion metrics. 

  Here are the main touchpoints at this stage : 

  • Company website pages 
  • Product pages and catalogues 
  • Communication between customers and sales reps 
  • Product packaging and labelling 
  • Point-of-sale (POS) — the final touchpoint the prospective customer will reach before making the final purchasing decision 

  Touchpoints after a purchase

  You can use touchpoints after a purchase to maintain a positive relationship and keep current customers engaged. Examples of touchpoints that contribute to a good post-purchase experience for the customer include the following : 

  • Thank-you emails 
  • Email newsletters 
  • Customer satisfaction surveys 
  • Cross-selling emails 
  • Renewal options 
  • Customer loyalty programs

  Email marketing remains significant across all touchpoint segments, with 44% of CMOs agreeing that it’s essential to their marketing strategy — and it also plays a particularly important role in the post-purchase experience. For 61.1% of marketing teams, email open rates are higher than 20%.

  

  Sixty-nine percent of consumers say they’ve stopped doing business with a brand following a bad experience, so the importance of customer service touchpoints shouldn’t be overlooked. Live chat, chatbots, self-service resources, and customer service teams are integral to the post-purchase experience.

  Attribution models : Assigning value to marketing touchpoints 

  Determining the most effective touchpoints — those that directly contribute to conversions — is a process known as marketing attribution. The goal here is to identify the specific channels and points of contact with prospective customers that result in revenue for the company.

  

  You can use these insights to understand — and maximise — marketing return on investment (ROI). Otherwise, you risk allocating your budget to the wrong channels. 

  It’s possible to group attribution models into two categories — single-touch and multi-touch — depending on whether you assign value to one or more contributing touchpoints.

  Single-touch attribution models, where you’re giving credit for the conversion to a single touchpoint, include the following :

  • First-touch attribution : This assigns credit for the conversion to the first interaction a customer had with a brand ; however, it fails to consider lower-funnel touchpoints.
  • Last-click attribution : This focuses only on bottom-of-funnel marketing and credits the last interaction the customer had with a brand before completing a purchase.
  • Last non-direct : Credits the touchpoint immediately preceding a direct touchpoint with all the credit.

  Multi-touch attribution models are more complex and distribute the credit for conversion across multiple relevant touchpoints throughout the customer journey :

  • Linear attribution : The simplest multi-touch attribution model assigns equal values to all contributing touchpoints.
  • Position-based or U-shaped attribution : This assigns the greatest value to the first and last touchpoint — with 40% of the conversion credit each — and then divides the remaining 20% across all the other touchpoints.
  • Time-decay attribution : This model assigns the most credit to the customer’s most recent interactions with a brand, assuming that the touchpoints that occur later in the journey have a bigger impact on the conversion.

  Consider the following when choosing the most appropriate attribution model for your business :

  • The length of your typical sales cycle
  • Your marketing goals : increasing awareness, lead generation, driving revenue, etc.
  • How many stages and touchpoints make up your sales funnel

  Sometimes, it even makes sense to measure marketing performance using more than one attribution model.

  With the sheer volume of data that’s constantly generated across numerous online touchpoints, from your website to social media channels, it’s practically impossible to collect and analyse it manually.

  You’ll need an advanced web analytics platform to identify key touchpoints and assign value to them.

  Matomo’s Marketing Attribution feature can accurately measure the performance of different touchpoints to ensure that you’re allocating resources to the right channels. This is done in a compliant manner, without the need of data sampling or requiring cookie consent screens (excluding in Germany and the UK), ensuring both accuracy and privacy compliance.

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  Customer journey KPIs for measuring marketing campaign performance 

  Measuring the impact of different touchpoints on marketing campaign performance can help you understand how customer interactions drive conversions — and how to optimise your future efforts. 

  

  Clearly, this is not a one-time effort. You should continuously reevaluate the crucial touchpoints that drive the most engagement at different stages of the customer journey. 

  Web analytics platforms can provide valuable insights into ever-changing consumer behaviours and trends and help you make informed decisions. 

  At the moment, Google is the most popular solution in the web analytics industry, with a combined market share of more than 70%. 

  However, if privacy, data accuracy, and GDPR compliance are a priority for you, Matomo is an alternative worth considering. 

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  KPIs to track before a purchase 

  During the pre-purchase stage, focus on the KPIs that measure the effectiveness of marketing activities across various online touchpoints — landing pages, email campaigns, social channels and ad placement on SERPs, for instance. 

  KPIs to track during the consideration stage include the following : 

  • Cost-per-click (CPC) : The CPC, the total cost of paid online advertising divided by the number of clicks those ads get, indicates whether you’re getting a good ROI. In the UK, the average CPC for search advertising is $1.22. Globally, it averages $0.62.
  • Engagement rate : The engagement rate, which is the total number of interactions divided by the number of followers, is useful for measuring the performance of social media touchpoints. Customer engagement also applies to other channels, like tracking average time on-page, form conversions, bounce rates, and other website interactions. 
  • Click-through rate (CTR) : The CTR — or the number of clicks your ads receive compared to the number of times they’re shown — helps you measure the performance of CTAs, email newsletters and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

  KPIs to track during a purchase 

  As a potential customer moves further down the sales funnel and reaches the decision stage, where they’re ready to make the choice to purchase, you should be tracking the following : 

  • Conversion rate : This is the percentage of leads that convert into customers by completing the desired action relative to the total number of website visitors. It shows you whether you’re targeting the right people and providing a frictionless checkout experience.
  • Sales revenue : This refers to the quantity of products sold multiplied by the product’s price. It helps you track the company’s ability to generate profit. 
  • Cost per conversion : This KPI is the total cost of online advertising in relation to the number of conversions. It measures the effectiveness of different marketing channels and the costs of converting prospective customers into buyers. It also forecasts future ad spend.

  KPIs to track after purchase 

  At the post-purchase stage, your priority should be gathering feedback : 

  Customer feedback surveys are great for collecting insights into customers’ post-purchase experience, opinions about your brand, products and services, and needs and expectations. 

  In addition to measuring customer satisfaction, these insights can help you identify points of friction, forecast future growth and revenue and spot customers at risk of churning. 

  Focus on the following customer satisfaction and retention metrics : 

  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) : This metric, which is gathered through customer satisfaction surveys, helps you gauge satisfaction levels. After all, 77% of consumers consider great customer service an important driver of brand loyalty.
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) : Based on single-question customer surveys, NPS indicates how likely a customer is to recommend your business.
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) : The CLV is the profit you can expect to generate from one customer throughout their relationship with your company. 
  • Customer Health Score (CHS) : This score can assess how “healthy” the customer’s relationship with your brand is and identify at-risk customers.

  Marketing touchpoints : Tips and best practices 

  Customer experience is more important today than ever. 

  

  Salesforce’s 2022 State of the Connected Consumer report indicated that, for 88% of customers, the experience the brand provides is just as important as the product itself. 

  Here’s how you can build your customer touchpoint strategy and use effective touchpoints to improve customer satisfaction, build a loyal customer base, deliver better digital experiences and drive growth : 

  Understand the customer’s end-to-end experience 

  The typical customer’s journey follows a non-linear path of individual experiences that shape their awareness and brand preference. 

  Seventy-three percent of customers expect brands to understand their needs. So, personalising each interaction and delivering targeted content at different touchpoint segments — supported by customer segmentation and tools like Matomo — should be a priority. 

  Try to put yourself in the prospective customer’s shoes and understand their motivation and needs, focusing on their end-to-end experience rather than individual interactions. 

  Create a customer journey map 

  Once you understand how prospective customers interact with your brand, it becomes easier to map their journey from the pre-purchase stage to the actual purchase and beyond. 

  By creating these visual “roadmaps,” you make sure that you’re delivering the right content on the right channels at the right times and to the right audience — the key to successful marketing.

  Identify best-performing digital touchpoints 

  You can use insights from marketing attribution to pinpoint areas that are performing well. 

  By analysing the data provided by Matomo’s Marketing Attribution feature, you can determine which digital touchpoints are driving the most conversions or engagement, allowing you to focus your resources on optimising these channels for even greater success. 

  This targeted approach helps maximise the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and ensures a higher return on investment.

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  Discover key marketing touchpoints with Matomo 

  The customer’s journey rarely follows a direct route. If you hope to reach more customers and improve their experience, you’ll need to identify and manage individual marketing touchpoints every step of the way.

  While this process looks different for every business, it’s important to remember that your customers’ experience begins long before they interact with your brand for the first time — and carries on long after they complete the purchase. 

  In order to find these touchpoints and measure their effectiveness across multiple marketing channels, you’ll have to rely on accurate data — and a powerful web analytics tool like Matomo can provide those valuable marketing insights. 

  Try Matomo free for 21-days. No credit card required.

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• CRO Audit : Increase Your Conversions in 10 Simple Steps

  25 mars 2024, par Erin

  You have two options if you’re unhappy with your website’s conversion rates.

  The first is to implement a couple of random tactics you heard on that marketing podcast, which worked for a business completely unrelated to yours. 

  The other is to take a more systematic, measured approach. An approach that finds specific problems with the pages on your site and fixes them one by one. 

  You’re choosing the second option, right ?

  Good, then let’s explain what a conversion rate optimisation audit is and how you can complete one using our step-by-step process.

  What is a CRO audit ?

  A conversion rate optimisation audit (CRO audit) systematically evaluates your website. It identifies opportunities to enhance your website’s performance and improve conversion rates. 

  During the audit, you’ll analyse your website’s entire customer journey, collect valuable user behaviour data and cross reference that with web analytics to find site elements (forms, calls-to-actions, etc.) that you can optimise.

  

  It’s one (and usually the first) part of a wider CRO strategy. 

  For example, an online retailer might run a CRO audit to discover why cart abandonment rates are high. The audit may throw up several potential problems (like a confusing checkout form and poor navigation), which the retailer can then spend time optimising using A/B tests. 

  Why run a CRO audit ?

  A CRO audit can be a lot of work, but it’s well worth the effort. Here are the benefits you can expect from running one.

  Generate targeted and relevant insights

  You’ve probably already tested some “best practice” conversion rate optimisations, like changing the colour of your CTA button, adding social proof or highlighting benefits to your headlines. 

  These are great, but they aren’t tailored to your audience. Running a CRO audit will ensure you find (and rectify) the conversion bottlenecks and barriers that impact your users, not someone else’s.

  Improve conversion rates

  Ultimately, CRO audits are about improving conversion rates and increasing revenue. Finding and eliminating barriers to conversion makes it much more likely that users will convert. 

  But that’s not all. CRO audits also improve the user experience and customer satisfaction. The audit process will help you understand how users behave on your website, allowing you to create a more user-friendly customer experience. 

  A 10-step process for running your first CRO audit 

  Want to conduct your first CRO audit ? Follow the ten-step process we outline below :

  

  1. Define your goals

  Start your CRO audit by setting conversion goals that marry with the wider goals of your business. The more clearly you define your goals, the easier it will be to evaluate your website for opportunities. 

  Your goals could include :

  • Booking more trials
  • Getting more email subscribers
  • Reducing cart abandonments

  You should also define the specific actions users need to take for you to achieve these goals. For example, users will have to click on your call-to-action and complete a form to book more trials. On the other hand, reducing cart abandonments requires users to add items to their cart and click through all of the forms during the checkout process. 

  If you’re unsure where to start, we recommend reading our CRO statistics roundup to see how your site compares to industry averages for metrics like conversion and click-through rates. 

  You’ll also want to ensure you track these conversion goals in your web analytics software. In Matomo, it only takes a few minutes to set up a new conversion goal, and the goals dashboard makes it easy to see your performance at a glance. 

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  2. Review your analytics

  With your goals in mind, the next step is to dive into your website analytics and identify pages that need improvement.

  Consider the following conversion metrics when analysing pages :

  • Conversion rate
  • Average time on page
  • Average order value
  • Click-through rate

  Ensure you’re analysing metrics aligning with the goals you set in step one. Average order value could be a great metric to track if you want to reduce cart abandonments, for example, but it’s unsuitable to get more email subscribers.

  3. Research the user experience

  Next, you’ll want to gather user experience data to better understand how potential customers use your website and why they aren’t converting as often as you’d like. 

  You can use several tools for user behaviour analysis, but we recommend heatmaps and session recordings.

  Heatmaps visually represent how users click, move and scroll your website. It will show where visitors place their attention and which page elements are ignored. 

  Take a look at this example below from our website. As you can see, the navigation, headline and CTA get the most attention. If we weren’t seeing as many conversions as we liked and our CTAs were getting ignored, that might be a sign to change their colour or placement. 

  

  Session recordings capture the actions users take as they browse your website. They let you watch a video playback of how visitors behave, capturing clicks and scrolls so you can see each visitor’s steps in order. 

  Session recordings will show you how users navigate and where they drop off. 

  4. Analyse your forms

  Whether your forms are too confusing or too long, there are plenty of reasons for users to abandon your forms. 

  But how many forms are they abandoning exactly and which forms are there ?

  That’s what form analysis is for. 

  Running a form analysis will highlight which forms need work and reveal whether forms could be contributing to a page’s poor conversion rate. It’s how Concrete CMS tripled its leads in just a few days.

  Matomo’s Form Analytics feature makes running form analysis easy.

  

  Just open up the forms dashboard to get a snapshot of your forms’ key metrics, including average hesitation time, starter rate and submission rates. 

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  5. Analyse your conversion funnel

  Next, analyse the conversion funnel to see if there’s an obvious bottleneck or several pages where visitors abandon your desired action. Common conversion abandonment points are shopping carts and forms.

  

  For example, you could find there is a drop-off in conversions between checking out and making a purchase or between booking a demo and signing up for a subscription. Understanding where these drop-offs occur lets you dig deeper and make targeted improvements.

  Don’t worry if you’ve got a very long funnel. Start at the bottom and work backward. Problems with the pages at the very end of your funnel tasked with converting customers (landing pages, checkout pages, etc.) will have the biggest impact on your conversion rate. So, it makes sense to start there. 

  6. Analyse campaigns and traffic sources (marketing attribution)

  It’s now time to analyse traffic quality to ensure you’re powering your conversion optimisation efforts with the best traffic possible. 

  This can also help you find your best customers so you can focus on acquiring more of them and tailoring your optimisation efforts to their preferences. 

  Run a marketing attribution report to see which traffic sources generate the most conversions and have the highest conversion rates. 

  

  Using marketing attribution is crucial here because it gives a fuller picture of how customers move through their journey, recognising the impact of various touchpoints in making a decision, unlike last-click attribution, which only credits the final touchpoint before a conversion.

  7. Use surveys and other qualitative data sources

  Increase the amount of qualitative data you have access to by speaking directly to customers. Surveys, interviews and other user feedback methods add depth and context to your user behaviour research.

  Sure, you aren’t getting feedback from hundreds of customers like you do with heatmaps or session recordings, but the information can sometimes be much richer. Users will often tell you outright why they didn’t take a specific action in a survey response (or what convinced them to convert). 

  Running surveys is now even easier in Matomo, thanks to the Matomo Surveys third-party plugin. This lets you add a customisable survey popup to your site, the data from which is automatically added to Matomo and can be combined with Matomo segments.

  8. Develop a conversion hypothesis

  Using all of the insights you’ve gathered up to this point, you can now hypothesise what’s wrong and how you can fix it. 

  Here’s a template you can use :

  

  This could end up looking something like the following :

  Based on evidence gathered from web analytics and heatmaps, moving our signup form above the fold will fix our lack of free trial signups, improving signups by 50%.

  

  Make sure you write your hypothesis down somewhere. Matomo lets you document your hypothesis when creating an A/B test, so it’s easy to reflect on when the test finishes. 

  9. Run A/B tests

  Now, it’s time to put your theory into practice by running an A/B test.

  Create an experiment using a platform like Matomo that creates two different versions of your page : the original and one with the change you mentioned in your hypothesis. 

  There’s no set time for you to run an A/B test. Just keep running it until the outcome is statistically significant. This is something your A/B testing platform should do automatically. 

  A statistically significant result means it would be very unlikely the outcome doesn’t happen in the long term.

  

  As you can see in the image above, the wide header variation has significantly outperformed both the original and the other variation. So we can be pretty confident about making the change permanent. 

  If the outcome of your A/B test also validates your conversion hypothesis, you can implement the change. If not, analyse the data, brainstorm another hypothesis and run another A/B test. 

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  10. Monitor and iterate

  You need to develop a culture of continuous improvement to succeed with conversion rate optimisation. That means constantly monitoring your conversion goals and running tests to improve your metrics. 

  While you don’t need to run a conversion audit every month, you should run audits regularly throughout the year.

  How often should you conduct a CRO audit ? 

  You should conduct a CRO audit fairly regularly. 

  We recommend creating a CRO schedule that sees you run a CRO audit every six to 12 months. That will ensure you continue identifying problem pages and keeping your conversion rates competitive. 

  Regular CRO audits will also account for evolving consumer behaviours, changes in your industry and your own business goals, all of which can impact your approach conversion rate optimisation. 

  Run your CRO audit with Matomo

  A CRO audit process is the only way you can identify conversion optimisation methods that will work for your site and your target audience. It’s a methodical, data-backed strategy for making targeted improvements to send conversion rates soaring. 

  There are a lot of steps to complete, but you don’t need dozens of tools to run a CRO audit process. 

  Just one : Matomo.

  Unlike other web analytics platforms, like Google Analytics, Matomo has the built-in tools and plugins to help with every step of the CRO audit process, from web analytics to conversion funnel analysis and A/B testing. With its accurate, unsampled data and privacy-friendly tracking, Matomo is the ideal choice for optimising conversions. 

  Learn how to increase your conversions with Matomo, and start a free 21-day trial today. No credit card required.

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• What Is Incrementality & Why Is It Important in Marketing ?

  26 mars 2024, par Erin

  Imagine this : you just launched your latest campaign and it was a major success.

  You blew last month’s results out of the water.

  You combined a variety of tactics, channels and ad creatives to make it work.

  Now, it’s time to build the next campaign.

  The only issue ?

  You don’t know what made it successful or how much your recent efforts impacted the results.

  You’ve been building your brand for years. You’ve built up a variety of marketing pillars that are working for you. So, how do you know how much of your campaign is from years of effort or a new tactic you just implemented ?

  The key is incrementality.

  This is a way to properly attribute the right weight to your marketing tactics.

  In this article, we break down what incrementality is in marketing, how it differs from traditional attribution and how you can calculate and track it to grow your business.

  What is incrementality in marketing ?

  Incrementality in marketing is growth that can be directly credited to a marketing effort above and beyond the success of the branding.

  It looks at how much a specific tactic positively impacted a campaign on top of overall branding and marketing strategies.

  

  For example, this could be how much a specific tactic, campaign or channel helped increase conversions, email sign-ups or organic traffic.

  The primary purpose of incrementally in marketing is to more accurately determine the impact a single marketing variable had on the success of a project.

  It removes every other factor and isolates the specific method to help marketers double down on that strategy or move on to new tactics.

  With Matomo, you can track conversions simply. With our last non-direct channel attribution system, you’ll be able to quickly see what channels are converting (and which aren’t) so you can gain insights into incrementality. 

  See why over 1 million websites choose Matomo today.

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  How incrementality differs from attribution

  In marketing and advertising, it’s crucial to understand what tactics and activities drive growth.

  Incrementality and attribution help marketers and business owners understand what efforts impact their results.

  But they’re not the same.

  Here’s how they differ :

  

  Incrementality explained

  Incrementality measures how much a specific marketing campaign or activity drives additional sales or growth.

  Simply put, it’s analysing the difference between having never implemented the campaign (or tactic or channel) in the first place versus the impact of the activity.

  In other words, how much revenue would you have generated this month without campaign A ?

  And how much additional revenue did you generate directly due to campaign A ?

  The reality is that dozens of factors impact revenue and growth.

  You aren’t just pouring your marketing into one specific channel or campaign at a time.

  Chances are, you’ve got your hands on several marketing initiatives like SEO, PPC, organic social media, paid search, email marketing and more.

  Beyond that, you’ve built a brand with a not-so-tangible impact on your recurring revenue.

  So, the question is, if you took away your new campaign, would you still be generating the same amount of revenue ?

  And, if you add in that campaign, how much additional revenue and growth did it directly create ?

  That is incrementality. It’s how much a campaign went above and beyond to add new revenue that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

  So, how does attribution play into all of this ?

  Attribution explained

  Attribution is simply the process of assigning credit for a conversion to a particular marketing touchpoint.

  While incrementality is about narrowing down the overall revenue impact from a particular campaign, attribution seeks to point to a specific channel to attribute a sale.

  For example, in any given marketing campaign, you have a few marketing tactics.

  Let’s say you’re launching a limited-time product.

  You might have :

  • Paid ads via Facebook and Instagram
  • A blog post sharing how the product works
  • Organic social media posts on Instagram and TikTok
  • Email waitlist campaign building excitement around the upcoming product
  • SMS campaigns to share a limited-time discount

  So, when the time comes for the sale launch, and you generate $30,000 in revenue, what channel gets the credit ?

  Do you give credit to the paid ads on Facebook ? What about Instagram ? They got people to follow you and got them on the email waitlist.

  Do you give credit to email for reminding people of the upcoming sale ? What about your social media posts that reminded people there ?

  Or do you credit your SMS campaign that shared a limited-time discount ?

  Which channel is responsible for the sale ?

  This is what attribution is all about.

  It’s about giving credit where credit is due.

  The reason you want to attribute credit ? So you know what’s working and can double down your efforts on the high-impact marketing activities and channels.

  Leveraging incrementality and attribution together

  Incrementality and attribution aren’t competing methods of analysing what’s working.

  They’re complementary to one another and go hand in hand.

  You can (and should) use attribution and incrementality in your marketing to help understand what activities, campaigns and channels are making the biggest incremental impact on your business growth.

  Why it’s important to measure incrementality

  Incrementality is crucial to measure if you want to pour your time, money and effort into the right marketing channels and tactics.

  Here are a few reasons why you need to measure incrementality if you want to be successful with your marketing and grow your business :

  1. Accurate data

  If you want to be an effective marketer, you need to be accurate.

  You can’t blindly start marketing campaigns in hopes that you will sell many products or services.

  That’s not how it works.

  Sure, you’ll probably make some sales here and there. But to truly be effective with your work, you must measure your activities and channels correctly.

  Incrementality helps you see how each channel, tactic or campaign made a difference in your marketing.

  Matomo gives you 100% accurate data on your website activities. Unlike Google Analytics, we don’t use data sampling which limits how much data is analysed.

  

  2. Helps you to best determine the right tactics for success

  How can you plan your marketing strategy if you don’t know what’s working ?

  Think about it.

  You’ll be blindly sailing the seas without a compass telling you where to go.

  Measuring incrementality in your marketing tactics and channels helps you understand the best tactics.

  It shows you what’s moving the needle (and what’s not).

  Once you can see the most impactful tactics and channels, you can forge future campaigns that you know will work.

  3. Allows you to get the most out of your marketing budget

  Since incrementality sheds light on what’s moving your business forward, you can confidently implement your efforts on the right tactics and channels.

  Guess what happens when you start doubling down on the most impactful activities ?

  You start increasing revenue, decreasing ad spend and getting a higher return on investment.

  The result is that you will get more out of your marketing budget.

  Not only will you boost revenue, but you’ll also be able to boost profit margins since you’re not wasting money on ineffective tactics.

  4. Increase traffic

  When you see what’s truly working in your business, you can figure out what channels and tactics you should be working.

  Incrementality helps you understand not only what your best revenue tactics are but also what channels and campaigns are bringing in the most traffic.

  When you can increase traffic, you can increase your overall marketing impact.

  5. Increase revenue

  Finally, with increased traffic, the inevitable result is more conversions.

  More conversions mean more revenue.

  Incrementality gives you a vision of the tactics and channels that are converting the best.

  If you can see that your SMS campaigns are driving the best ROI, then you know that you’ll grow your revenue by pouring more into acquiring SMS leads.

  By calculating incrementality regularly, you can rest assured that you’re only investing time and money into the most impactful activities in terms of revenue generation.

  How to calculate and test incrementality in marketing

  Now that you understand how incrementality works and why it’s important to calculate, the question is : 

  How do you calculate and conduct incrementality tests ?

  Given the ever-changing marketing landscape, it’s crucial to understand how to calculate and test incrementally in your business.

  If you’re not sure how incrementality testing works, then follow these simple steps :

  

  Your first step to get an incrementality measurement is to conduct what’s referred to as a “holdout test.”

  It’s not a robust test, but it’s an easy way to get the ball rolling with incrementality.

  Here’s how it works :

  1. Choose your target audience.

  With Matomo’s segmentation feature, you can get pretty specific with your target audience, such as :

  • • Visitors from the UK
    • Returning visitors
    • Mobile users
    • Visitors who clicked on a specific ad

  2. Split your audience into two groups :

  1. • Control group (60% of the segment)
     • Test group (40% of the segment)

  3. Target the control group with your marketing tactic (the simpler the tactic, the better).

  4. Target the test group with a different marketing tactic.

  5. Analyse the results. The difference between the control and test groups is the incremental lift in results. The new marketing tactic is either more effective or not.

  6. Repeat the test with a new control group (with an updated tactic) and a new test group (with a new tactic).

  Matomo can help you analyse the results of your campaigns in our Goals feature. Set up business objectives so you can easily track different goals like conversions.

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  Here’s an example of how this incrementality testing could look in real life.

  Imagine a fitness retailer wants to start showing Facebook ads in their marketing mix.

  The marketing manager decided to conduct a holdout test. If we match our example below with the steps above, this is how the holdout test might look.

  1. They choose people who’ve purchased free weights in the past as their target audience (see how that segmentation works ?).
  2. They split this segment into a control group and a test group.
  3. For this test, they direct their regular marketing campaign to the control group (60% of the segment). The campaign includes promoting a 20% off sale on organic social media posts, email marketing, and SMS.
  4. They direct their regular marketing campaign plus Facebook ads to the test group (40% of the segment).
  5. They ran the campaign for three weeks with the goal for sale conversions and noticed :

  • • The control group had a 1.5% conversion rate.
    • The test group (with Facebook ads) had a 2.1% conversion rate.
    • In this scenario, they could see the group who saw the Facebook ads convert better.
    • They created the following formula to measure the incremental lift of the Facebook ads :

  

  • • Here’s how the calculation works out : (2.1% – 1.5%) / 1.5% = 40%

  The Facebook ads had a positive 40% incremental lift in conversions during the sale.

  Incrementality testing isn’t a one-and-done process, though.

  While this first test is a great sign for the marketing manager, it doesn’t mean they should immediately throw all their money into Facebook ads.

  They should continue conducting tests to verify the initial test.

  Use Matomo to track incrementality today

  Incrementality can give you insights into exactly what’s working in your marketing (and what’s not) so you can design proven strategies to grow your business.

  If you want more help tracking your marketing efforts, try Matomo today.

  Our web analytics and behaviour analytics platform gives you firsthand data on your website visitors you can use to craft effective marketing strategies.

  Matomo provides 100% accurate data. Unlike other major web analytics platforms, we don’t do data sampling. What you see is what’s really going on in your website. That way, you can make more informed decisions for better results.

  At Matomo, we take privacy very seriously and include several advanced privacy protections to ensure you are in full control.

  As a fully compliant web analytics solution, we’re fully compliant with some of the world’s strictest privacy regulations like GDPR. With Matomo, you get peace of mind knowing you can make data-driven decisions while also being compliant. 

  If you’re ready to launch a data-driven marketing strategy today and grow your business, get started with our 21-day free trial now. No credit card required.

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