Europe Is Hopping On The Marketing Attribution And Analytics Bandwagon

By Jeff Keenan. SVP International, co-founder at LeadsRx, helping customers improve revenue through data/analytics and promote a customer-centric attitude.

According to one report, “Europe’s digital advertising market was valued at $84.02 billion in 2021 and will grow by 8.59% annually over 2021-2031 owing to the technological advancement, rising digital ad spending, growing Internet users, and the prevalence of mobile phones and digital media across the region.”

With all that marketing and advertising, European companies have figured out that it is wise to measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. That “billions” figure above only encompasses digital advertising, but what about advertising on traditional offline channels like TV and radio? Is the proliferation of streaming audio and video channels and podcasts included in the digital spend?

Enter marketing attribution, specifically multi-touch attribution and customer journey analytics, or MTA and CJA. With full transparency, it is what the company I co-founded seven years ago, LeadsRx (now part of the Unbounce family), does. I’m currently based in Spain helping serve our European clients and grow our market share here.

In an episode of our podcast, Matt Finn, senior manager of strategy and business development at MarketForce, talks about how brands in the European Union are focusing on data to understand what is, and is not, working in their marketing campaigns.

To no surprise, Europe lags behind the U.S. in using MTA and CJA solutions. Also to no surprise, Europe has stricter rules around protecting consumer data privacy. While the latter has contributed some to the slow roll toward heavy marketing analytics use in Europe, marketing analytics is a fairly new mix of art and science that has really taken off in the past half-decade.

To the data privacy end, I believe data should be used for good: People + Data = Better. On the one hand, the “people” in the equation are brand owners and their marketing, sales and finance teams who can take attribution and customer journey data and make sense of it. They can align that data and insights drawn from it with the business strategy to better reach, and better serve, their customers—and hopefully do it more efficiently while achieving increased revenues.

The other side of the “people” part of the equation is the consumers that brands are trying to reach. People want to trust brands.

In its “2022 Global Marketing Trends” report (download required), Deloitte says the idea is to design a human-first data experience.

At LeadsRx, we believe People + Data = Better. What we mean by that is that it takes a person with experience—a data analyst, or an experienced marketer who knows how to look at, say, attribution data, draw insights from it and make decisions to increase marketing performance. Related to people, we believe it’s OK to know something about customers who are being marketed to and to do so without being creepy.

Customers buy from a brand because they have trust, and they trust that the brand is looking out for their interest and genuinely serving up additional information that is of value: a discount offer, a new product release that might be helpful or simply ideas that will make their lives easier.

We are seeing more and more companies embrace marketing analytics in Europe; hence my move to Spain—my second stint over here.

And it’s not that hard to get started. Whether a brand has two campaigns—paid Google ads and some paid social ads—or is blasting the TV and radio airwaves with ads, advertising on podcasts, doing paid and organic search and social campaigns, and maybe even throwing a digital billboard inside a video game, all of those touchpoints should be measured. If that paid Instagram ad is doing well and the radio ad is not, the marketing spend should be adjusted accordingly.

Or maybe you have three podcast ads: the one that the host of the program reads performs well and leads to more paid customers, while the other two are simply awareness ads and do not perform. Toss more money toward the one that is working and cut back on the underperforming ads. Data from multi-touch attribution will make it clear in an impartial manner that unbiased, transparent truth is what makes marketing analytics so amazing. One marketer may think radio will work better than Google ads, or that the non-host-read podcast ad will be more effective, but the analytics data will simply say “this works, this doesn’t.”

There’s nothing better than witnessing the “aha!” moment when a marketing team member—or better yet, the CMO they report to—views the impartial data that shows a marketing channel is working, recognizes one that is not or sees how multiple channels are working together.

On the B2B front, Gartner, Inc. points to digitization making it easier for companies to target the right buyers, but the competition to win customer attention is fierce. Among four key themes that Gartner says will drive marketing strategies in 2022 is customer journey orchestration, which involves “mapping a customer’s entire experience with a business. It helps ensure a holistic customer view is considered when planning new products or services to improve the customer experience.”

Unbiased attribution and journey analytics data can help a brand or business focus its marketing, and more European businesses are, or should, begin capitalizing on using analytics tools available to them.