For Marketing Leads, Business Intelligence (BI) Officers, and CEOs, the biggest challenge often lies in connecting marketing efforts to actual business results. Whether you’re running PR campaigns, investing in influencer marketing, or managing a mix of offline and online media, understanding the true ROI of your efforts is crucial for making smarter decisions and scaling your business with influencer marketing attribution and PR attribution.
Yet, only 39% of marketers feel confident in measuring their ROI, according to 2024 State of Marketing report. In an age of data-driven marketing, this leaves many organizations flying blind.
We’ll explore:
- How marketing attribution models unlock growth.
- Why it is important to learn how to track and report properly on hard-to-track marketing media, such as influencer marketing attribution, PR attribution.
- A framework for improving your marketing attribution strategy.
- How software can help consolidate your marketing data into actionable reports.
Who We Are
A team of marketing executives who managed to scale businesses from $0 to $500M annual revenue, because we figured out the leading “all-in” marketing channels and how much investments to leave on each other channels, while we were building our own marketing attribution model and software.
Now the software is called Blank Tracker and the team using it everyday - BlankLabel.team
Got questions? Contact!
Why Marketing Attribution Matters for Scaling Businesses
Imagine this scenario: Your team invests in a multi-channel marketing campaign that includes:
- Google Seach ads
- A Facebook ad campaign.
- Retail in-store placement.
- A YouTube influencer collaboration.
- A press release featured in top-tier publications.
All marketing departments are touting their own horns, sending you their beautifully crafted slides with pictures.
However, among all the noise and egos, a million dollar question then is - which marketing channel made the biggest impact at what ROI.
And a multi-million dollar following question: Which marketing channel can multiply their output 100 times, so that the return (ROI) would be same good? .
In order to answer the important main questions, let’s put software and data to work, in order to answer the supporting multiple questions, such as:
Did the YouTube influencer generate buzz that led to organic searches and revenue followed? Or did the press release plant the seed and the wave of interest and revenue?
Key Pain Points for Marketing Leaders and BI Professionals
1. Siloed, Uncleaned Data that doesn’t match together: Insights are spread across platforms like Google Ads, Meta, Influencer tools, PR reports in PPTS.
Even when most of data is imported to a central data warehouse, the data coming in from PR attribution, Influencer marketing attribution, Affiliate teams is always never structured in a way and clean enough, in order to be plugged into the central report.
Solution:
Software for the data gathering, and feeding into a central reporting interface. Instructing marketing teams and vendors not to waste anymore time on their custom reports, PPTs. Everything has to go into one place in the required format.
2. Inefficient Budget Allocation: Without clear ROI data, you risk underinvesting in effective channels or overspending on low-performing ones.
Solution:
The answer is gonna come, after the data from absolute majority of marketing channels is collected in a central database, and put into the report where all marketing channels are put in the same playing ground, in the same chart.
3. Long-Term Measurement Gaps: Most tools don’t account for the long-tail impact of content like online articles or YouTube videos.
Solution:
Software for the data gathering and splitting the reach and costs into each day/week/month + updating reach all the time, even after 5 years. Mindblowing insights will change your marketing directions forever, once the data will show how much money did the long-tail marketing channels have earned the organization, as compared to a fast burning and disappearing Meta ad. .
Gartner reports that organizations with effective attribution models see a 30% higher ROI compared to those without.
Hard-to-track and attribute marketing channels, such as PR and Influencer Marketing: What is not easy reaps greater rewards
If some marketing method is easy to run and track, that means you will compete with 1 million other marketers.
Learning how to master these channels gives your company / brand / service an edge.
We have been focusing on content-based story-telling marketing since 2006, gathered data, learned and by 2016 could generate $500M revenues with extreme profitability, using mainly those “hard to master and attribute” marketing channels. The key of course was software and clean data.
The lessons learned
This is just few things we’ve learned while executing several marketing channels on a high scale (min $5M/year spend each), and looking back at everything years later:
The Long-Tail Effect of PR
PR campaigns are often undervalued because their results unfold over months or even years. For example: a press feature in an industry publication could generate website traffic and revenues for six months. And then continue to generate consistent yearly sales, even 5 years later.
A case study from Nielsen showed that PR campaigns boost brand trust by 56%, which often translates into long-term sales growth.
PR activities are also often madly overvalued, by misleading reporting. It is common for CEO/CMO to receive a PPT report with multiple images, screengrabs, press clippings and a reach calculated in billions (because media outlet pushes their 2 billion reach number).
Instead, the Leads should:
- To use and provide the main report: PR team's output in numbers (number of publications/channels, number of articles/mentions/appearances - with realistic reach and costs broken down, with optional media tiers breakdown - and all that on the timeline. And if someone wants to dig deeper, there's a link to drill down and open each press clipping or the article or whatever shows the actual element how the audiences were exposed to then brand / product.
- The Reach of each PR activity/output is calculated in realistic numbers, including the pageviews of the article and forecasted eyeballs on the print, and the footprint in the event.
- The Reach is distributed over the correct Geographical units, correct benefiting products assigned, etc. Same with costs.
- The costs (including agency fees, 3rd party fees, staff costs) are distributed for each activity/output element.
- PR teams / agencies are instructed to not waste time on pictures and PPTs, as if they made sure the correct data is in, the report will show everything what is needed for executive analysis and judgement.
The Overwhelming 3rd Party Storytelling, Social Proof Power of Influencers
Influencers often drive immediate engagement, but their content lives on - physically, and in the minds of consumers . A YouTube review featuring your product might generate sales for years as new viewers discover it.
While running influencer marketing on a high scale and building a meaningful attribution model, the musts are:
- Each piece of content / placement influencer published has to be put into the database in a defined format. At first it could be a spreadsheet, however in the end it has to be imported as XLSX file or Google Sheet to software, where:
- Geo attribution is set, distributing all Reach and Costs geographically;
- Product/Service advertised is set and distributed correctly;
- Reach / Costs are broken down by 1 day units, in order to have any time granularity report needed.
- Data on Influencer is extracted automatically with APIs, as well as views, engagement of the content piece.
- Benefiting sales channels set.
- All other meaningful and notable marketing activities as well should be imported in a similar way,
- Output from PR teams
- Affiliate content placements (as well as just plan discount promoting inclusions)
- Retail online placements (feature in a newsletter blast, top category position, etc)
- Retail offline placements (Position at the counter, position at the entrance, etc. Footprint as reach)
- Bigger meaningful social media organic exposure moments;
- Radio exposure…
- TV exposure (if TV show - viewership as reach, if TV ad - converting GRPS to reach units)
- Note: data from media channels that give easy access to it (Meta ads, Google Ads) comes in straight to central data warehouse with APIs, with several helper custom dimensions and measures, in order to match the data of other marketing channels data in a most possible fair way.
- Revenue / Sales data should be imported broken down by sales channel, geography and product group, at least. With as higher time granularity as possible - where days are not possible, even month is fine in the beginning (later can break down a month by days).
Once data is ready, can build reports on a desired platform (from Tableau to Looker, whatever can handle big data sets) and enter new phases, levels, such as:
- Adding Google Search data as a signal of Interest (that comes before Revenue)
- Import data of at least 2 years period, for undeniable proofs what works what not (if there were doubts before, looking just at 3-9 months data set.
How Marketing Attribution Unlocks Your Growth Potential
What Is Marketing Attribution?
At its core, marketing attribution is the process of identifying which channels, campaigns, or touchpoints contribute most to your sales and conversions.
How to Build an Effective Attribution Model
1. Consolidate your marketing costs and revenue data.
For hard-to-track, hard-to-collect marketing channels use marketing attribution data tools like Blank Tracker. A software like that as a result gives API for live access to a cleaned, structured, unified data from:
- PR team efforts (online articles, events, social media organic exposure, paid articles, mentions, print placements, TV show exposure , …. )).
- Influencer activities (content on any social media channel)).
- Offline media channels (TV ads, print ads, radio ads).
- Affiliate marketing activities (discount placements, content placements, …. )
2. Track Long-Tail effect:
Capture the long-tail impact of content, while collecting and analyzing data over long periods of time, seeing the patterns repeat not only once a year, but each year, for years in a row, for additional confidence.
3. Segment by Geography and Product group as minimum:
Gain insights into how campaigns perform across regions and product lines. For example:
• Are PR efforts in the UK driving unexpected sales in Canada?
• Which influencer campaigns work best for specific product categories?
4. Automate and speed up Reporting:
Save time and resources by automating data collection and visualizing insights with no delays (if new data comes in, it has to appear in the reports with max 1h lag).
Businesses that adopt marketing attribution frameworks improve their budget efficiency by 20%, according to eMarketer.
How Blank Tracker Simplifies Marketing Attribution
Blank Tracker was built to address the challenges faced by Marketing Leads, BI Professionals, and CEOs:
• Consolidates Marketing Data apart from Meta/Google ads: All campaigns—online and offline—are unified, for immediate use with other data sets of the organization (such as sales) in in one report view, one timeline .
• Tracks Long-Tail Performance: Perfect for PR campaigns and influencer content, written content, that delivers ROI over months or years.
• Provides Granular Insights: Breaks down performance by geography, product, message type, benefiting sales channel, reach/cost associated with gender, age of audiences. Updates reach/cost data for each day, every day.
Take Control of Your Marketing ROI
For Marketing Leads, BI Officers, and CEOs, marketing attribution is no longer optional—it’s a necessity for scaling. Without it, you risk inefficiency and missed opportunities.
By using tools like Blank Tracker, you can:
1. FINALLY get a data set that will allow you having a report with all the marketing channels on one timeline, showing Costs and Reach
2. FINALLY filter your reports and see performance separated by: geography, product, message type, benefiting sales channel, reach/cost associated with gender, age of audiences
That alone will bring you from basic understanding to a whole new level of:
• Understand what’s driving your success.
• Optimize your budgets with precision.
• Unlock long-term growth opportunities.
Don’t let fragmented data hold your business back. Start leveraging data-driven attribution today, and watch your marketing investments translate into measurable success.
Checkout other posts
More on marketing attribution, influencer marketing management on high scale, PR attribution
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