What is the best snack that you have in your house right now? If you had to go to your cupboard, grab something and bring it back. What would it be? White cheddar popcorn.
I mean, I eat popcorn a lot. It's like my go-to snack. Okay, like the smart food. Yeah, exactly.
It's the brand of smart food. White cheddar, occasionally I might do the kettle corn version, but not on the regular. It's a treat. Welcome back to Stacking Growth Snacks.
I'm Steph Canola and I'm here with Sydney Waterfall. We are talking about attribution and funnel tracking. Last time we talked about the key elements that you need to understand when you're shifting to a demand-gen approach. In this episode, we're going to be talking about one of the key elements of that in self-reported attribution.
So, Sydney, what is self-reported attribution? It's adding a field. It's self-reported. It's asking your buyer, where did you hear about us?
What does that look like? What we recommend is to add a field to your conversion point on your website, specifically your declared intent, conversion form, hand raisers, typically demo, contact us, pricing, sales requests. That field should say, how did you hear about us? We also recommend that it should be required and it should be free text.
So the buyer can just put something in there. This is a qualitative touch point that you are capturing. This is not a quantitative measure. That is what makes it so powerful.
We also recommend when you put this on your form, you then have a second field behind the scenes processing this and categorizing it and making it much easier to put into your reporting. But that's at the highest level of self-reported attribution. So what is the value of self-reported attribution? I know you've got some data to back this up, so I'm excited to hear it.
This is a question that comes up a lot. There's usually a big, well, should we put this on our forms? If it's qualitative, how do we look at this? How do we analyze this?
How is this going to give us more data to action on? So we ran a study. We ran it on ourselves. Basically, what we've done is we have this field on our internal form for over two years.
This data set is for an entire year. For all of our demo form fields, which for us is going to be book a consultation call, book a strategy call on our website, it's our primary conversion point, we added this field, required free text field. There were 620 demo forms. What we wanted to look at is what does self-reported attribution say compared to our traditional software based attribution to understand how we would use these two data points together.
Software attribution showed 78% of the conversions were sourced from web search, which is direct, organic, and paid search, while customers, when they self-reported, only mentioned that 12% of the time. So there's a big disparity there. 85% of the self-reported values mentioned that they heard about us from dark social channels. So they mentioned social media, podcasts, word of mouth, and community.
So what did we learn from this? We learned that you need both data points to understand what's working and what's not. What is creating the demand and what is capturing the demand? I will like to call out that this is not one versus the other.
It's really two data points that tell you two separate things. Where did they hear about you? What channels did they hear about you? What things did they hear?
The second data point, when they were ready to talk to you and they wanted to engage in a sales conversation, where did that come from? What captured that demand? We tracked it all the way to revenue to see what that looked like and what changed. So when we looked at close-one data, 98% of our close-one revenue customers reported that they heard about us through social media, podcasts, word of mouth, and community.
This makes total sense to me because that has literally been the strategy for our brand since it started. We went all in on podcasts, LinkedIn, and personal brand and employees' personal brands. Now yours might not be that high of a percentage if you're not executing a strategy like ours, but it definitely will give you another data point to understand what is happening on channels that maybe you cannot directly attribute things to. Step one is you're going to need to update your forms.
So you're going to need to go into your marketing automation system and hopefully use global forms so it's not updating a ton of forms for you, but you're going to need to create actually two new fields. You're going to need to create the field that's going to be on the web form that is going to be how to do here about us. That's going to be a free text field and required. The second field that you're going to implement is how to do here about us category, or you can name it SRA, SRA Short-First Self-Record Attribution category, such as shorter text field in your internal systems.
You're going to implement this on your form. You can roll this out into A-B test on the form just to monitor conversion. You recommend that you look at your form and try to remove unnecessary fields. If there are some on there to monitor conversion, and we actually have some data inside the vault, which you can look at that talks about how we've implemented this field with multiple companies and haven't seen statistical significance in a decrease of conversion when looking to meetings booked.
I know that's always an objection that comes up internally that you'll have to work through, so we definitely have that. Then you're going to need to put some workflows in place that categorize the raw text field. We have a core set of recommendations that you can look at. We want to categorize those by major categories, and there are going to be some that are going to be specific to your company.
For example, you might have a field that's social media, and then you can have Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, whatever social media tools that are a part of your strategy. Once you have your form field set up that's going to live on your lead or contact object, then you need to make sure that field syncs to your CRM and is mapped to your CRM. Sometimes this happens automatically out of the box when you create fields, sometimes it doesn't depending on your infrastructure. Double-check that it syncs to your CRM.
You will also want to take that field. That's on the lead in contact. How'd you hear about this field? Map it to the opportunity or deal object.
This way, you can track that data point all the way to revenue, which is really important because we see different percentages and different categories driving demo requests. When you look at hero opportunities and revenue, you can then start to track the conversions and the conversion rate between different things that people are saying. For us, for example, podcast makes up a lower percentage of our demo requests, but a much higher percentage of our total close one. We know when podcasts comes in, we know it's going to convert at a higher rate historically than someone that says LinkedIn, for example.
That's a huge thing to know. That's the basic steps to get it implemented. All excellent information, Sydney. I'm really excited to hear more about hybrid attribution strategy when we see you next time.