Where are they coming from? 🗺️

Hi there 👋,

I’ve sent over fifty Growth Waves newsletters and managed to never discuss attribution.

That would be an achievement in itself, if it wasn’t quite shameful.

I beg you not to set the D2C police on me.

This happened with the best of intentions, as I find attribution to be a tricky topic to whittle down into an email.

I had assumed it was best left to the ‘attribution experts’.

However I spoke to a client recently about their growth challenge, which was finding where to spend the budget in order to scale, and I realised that this isn’t the only instance where attribution is responsible.

How does attribution work?

The concept of attribution is a simple one: figure out where people came from.

But the reality of attribution is a mess of touch points, worsened by offline and online interactions, multiple devices and tracking challenges.

Can you really blame me for avoiding this topic?

But while I may not have the perfect answer for attribution, I can offer some guidance for understanding the chaos. 

Please note this is aimed at acquisition channels, as if you apply this logic to brand awareness, you’ll massively underestimate the impact.

People don’t always directly convert or click through from social media, PR and especially offline reach.

With organic search, the challenge lies in the delay, as they might read it a few times and then return to subscribe.

So let’s focus on acquisition, and break it down into stages.

The Early Stage

Less than 5k monthly marketing budget

At this stage, I recommend getting multiple sources and comparing:

1. Post-purchase survey. Use a simple tool like Grapevine on Shopify to ask how they first heard about you. Regularly check and update this to ensure the data is actionable.

2. Analytics tool. Ensure you use UTMs for everything and see what the distribution is based on this.

3. Platform analytics. I’m the most skeptical when it comes to this. I feel like it is often over-reported in the case of branded Google Ads campaigns, email tools and retargeting. Yet in other cases, it is vastly underreported. However, still good to review.

Then try to bring all of these together for a complete overview.

That could be in a dashboard or Google Sheet.

Alternatively, the first two can be combined into the analytics tool if you send the survey responses as an event to Google Analytics.

Doing this allows you to spot patterns and highlight what is working.

When possible, I like to focus on increases in channels one at a time, to see how the results are impacted.

The Middle Stage 

5k+ monthly marketing spend

As your budget increases by at least 5k across channels, or perhaps even 10k to one channel, it becomes worth investing in a stronger attribution solution.

It’s like bringing a detective to solve the case of attribution.

That detective can then engage in additional tactics, like first-party tracking, to better understand what actually happened.

My go-to tool for this is Triple Whale.

It’s as if they watched everything I’d been trying to do manually for smaller companies, and then created an automated solution for this. 

They have a triple attribution model that combines a post-purchase survey (built-in), UTM data and pixel data to help you learn what is and isn’t working.

I learned so much the last time I did this for a client.

For example, their retargeting was over-reporting and prospecting was doing more than the Meta ads let on - 17% better!

I trust tools like these as they show you both the good and the bad, giving you better confidence in your decisions.

The Late Stage 

200k+ monthly marketing spend

Once you scale up to a spend of around 200k per month, you may need a custom tool or solution depending on your setup. There are many different options.

The main priority is to understand the impact of different channels and the length of the purchase journey, so that you can find the model for you.

It’ll be about balancing accuracy and speed.

For this I really would push you to work with an expert versus trying to solve it yourself, it’ll go a lot faster and save you a lot of missteps.

They’re hard to find, but incredible people like Franky Athill who started Attribution Lab (they help D2C scaleups get marketing mix modelling setup quickly) are worth talking with.

Recommendation

In every edition of Growth Waves, I also share a related book, individual or newsletter to check out related to the week's topic.

Take a moment to check out Triple Whale, you won’t regret it!

I was initially frustrated when Triple Whale switched to a demo sign-up. 

But after being walked through all their latest solutions and setup, I have to admit that it’s so helpful and not a complete sales pitch.

Instead, it was focused on whether we were at the right stage to get value from it.

If you plan a demo with them, and mention my name, you’ll get 10% off your price. 

For full transparency, this is an affiliate link, but it was offered after I started using them myself, and it allows me most importantly to provide a discount for my list as I can appreciate these tools can be quite the investment in the beginning.

You’ve got to know where your customers are coming from. 

Not only to see what works and increase your spend there, but to know how to handle these incoming customers.

Once set up, attribution tracking will be low-effort and easy to keep up with. 

I find it fascinating to find out how everyone discovered me and this newsletter.

It tells me a lot about what actually resonates with my audience.

So let me know how you first discovered Growth Waves, and if there are any topics you’d love to hear more about!

Daphne