What is your guilty pleasure snack? Salted dark chocolate. I don't think you can beat that. No, and it can't be, it has to be dark chocolate.
It can't be any other chocolate. Welcome back to Stacking Growth Snacks. I'm Steph Kraniola and I am here with Sydney Waterfall to talk about attribution and funnel tracking. Today we're talking about hybrid attribution.
So Sydney, just on a basic level, can you explain what hybrid attribution is? So hybrid attribution is essentially combining two attribution model touch points and looking at them together. You say attribution and, you know, people like start tensing up. So let's everybody relax and we'll get into it.
So the first touch point is going to be software-based attribution, which is going to be last touch to the conversion. And when we talk about conversion point, we're talking about the declared intent conversion on your website. So what's the software based attribution last touch when that event happened? I'm being very clear because there's a lot of first touch, 70 fifth touch, all this stuff, multi touch models, custom models that a lot of people go into.
So I want to kind of be very clear about what we mean by this. This software based attribution touch point can be done in any marketing automation system you use. It doesn't require a dedicated attribution tool to have this data. So everybody that has a marketing automation system likely has this.
The second component of hybrid attribution is self-reported attribution, which we talked about earlier, is the customer self-reporting, how did they hear about you, which is a qualitative input on that form conversion point. So both of these two things are captured at the same point in time on conversion. Your self-reported attribution is really what's informing you of what's creating demand, how your buyers are hearing about you. Your software based attribution is telling you what captured the demand.
Where did they come from right then and what channel? You want to take a look at both of these, which is why it's called hybrid attribution framework. So step one is just to verify that your software based attribution is set up correctly. So on your form and in your conversion, you want to make sure that it's set up to track dedicated UTM values.
And typically UTM's are the way that you are going to track your software based attribution. And then your software will also look at the referral that's coming in. If there's no UTM very similar to how Google Analytics will set if it's organic, direct, or other channel, if there's no UTM's present. So step one, make sure you have fields on the back of your form, where you're actually capturing the UTM data and that is tested and working.
We recommend that you use session based UTM's, which actually capture that UTM or whatever occurred during that session of conversion. And then the second part is setting up your software port attribution, making sure that field is being captured on the form and then making sure both of those are being captured on the lead in contact. You will probably also have other dedicated workflows that set other reportable summary fields for both of those data points in your marketing automation system, usually built in a workflow or a smart campaign, depending on what system you are using. Once you have that and you've got that done correctly at the lead in contact level, you're going to want to make sure that those fields are also mapped to the opportunity and deal level so that you can track it all the way to revenue.
Both of them, all of those fields. There's multiple fields for each one. All of those fields. So how do we recommend to do that?
Step one, you're going to require a contact to be on every deal or every opportunity that is created for new business. That's just best hygiene, sales, best practices. Yet we see it missed quite a bit. So make sure that the contact is required and then when that contact gets associated to that object, that those fields from the contact then copy or map and stamp to the opportunity or deal object.
That way you have seamless reporting for that field flow from conversion to opportunity creation to revenue. That's great. That's really helpful information to get it kicked off. Now, once you've got this running, how do you create visibility and buy in for your internal team?
You mentioned in the very first segment we did that it can sometimes feel a little scary if you're seeing numbers go down, but how do you help the team buy into this? We recommend that you have a report that looks at what captured the demand, a report that looks at what created the demand. What we do not recommend you do is put these two data points against each other to fight for credit. That is not going to help and it's going to cause more confusion than clarity.
Because what will happen is say, yeah, well, they mentioned this. So let's give X percent of the deal to this. And let's now for software based actually we're going to give it X percent. And basically what you're doing is you're just taking this framework and trying to push it into a multi touch framework.
Don't do that. So we recommend at each funnel stage now that you have the data on throughout your entire funnel at each funnel stage, you have a report. I'm just going to start at the top of the funnel, which is going to be conversions. At conversions, you're going to have a report.
Two graphs side by side that shows you here's our total count of conversions. Report number one is going to break it down by the sale of self reported attribution categories. Report number two is going to break it down by your software based attribution fields, which is normally again, it's a category or summary field. So it's normally going to be your source field, which is called its source deal source for this example.
So you've got to report side by side and you're able to see. Okay, how many demo requests were tagged and self reported with this? Great. We know that social media and specifically Facebook is X percent of that and you can measure that monthly quarterly, whatever time period you want.
You look at the second graph and you say, great, how did they actually demand get captured? Great. They came in through direct traffic. They came in through a referral site, branded paid search.
So there are two data points to use together, not against each other. And then you would do the same thing. So you're going to have your conversion. We recommend to have like meetings booked opportunity, create whatever that means for you and your business, your hero opportunities, which is your high intent revenue opportunity and then revenue.
So then you can kind of see your full funnel by these two views and be able to speak to the campaigns that you're driving that are going to be intended to create demand and awareness and the campaigns that you're spending and driving to capture that demand. And you can kind of speak to what's holistically working and not amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for watching and we'll see you next time.