Bizible is a Seattle based company founded by former Microsoft / Bing advertising veterans Aaron Bird and Peter Thompson. The company engineers analytics software that allows companies to accurately track offline revenue back to online marketing source – no small feat! They’ve got a pending patent on their technology too, it will be interesting to see if it’s granted. Anyway, I digress. Bizible recently conducted some market research through over 480,000 leads they’ve received through their Salesforce marketing analytics platform. The aim, to provide insight on how marketers should be thinking about attribution modeling.
Let’s clear up some phrases before we look further:
- Last touch refers to the last click (touch) that a user makes before turning into a lead.
- First touch refers to the first click in the marketing cycle, i.e. the first click that the user made to enter the marketing cycle.
Bizible found that search (Organic and Paid) accounted for 41 percent of the leads generated when through last click, but 56% when dealing with first click. In other words, of the leads captured across all the industry verticals, those people who entered the marketing cycle through first touch via search accounted for 41% and those who ended off the marketing cycle as a lead through search accounted for 56%. Those are big percentages considering how many digital marketing channels there are.
The following graph shows us the percentage of leads generated through first touch. Clearly showing that search is well ahead of the pack.
Further to this and getting a little more intricate, the study shows the percentage of leads won by first touch. In other words, the point of entry into the marketing cycle.
Another really interesting statistic is that which shows how long the marketing cycle is based on the first touch. In other words, if the first touch was Social, the marketing cycle was well below the average and search didn’t fall too far behind that. What this means is that if a persons first touch was social, the lead matured in about 18 days, that in comparison to 53 days if the first touch was via email.
An incredibly useful study which can be downloaded in full here (you’ll have to supply your email to get the document). Any business operating online needs to take these statistics into account when budgeting each year. Using the correct channels is what makes or breaks a company that relies on online marketing.
