This is an ongoing series of articles that cover the topics and insights shared during the three-day Real Conf 2021 hosted by Adfenix. The following article summaries the closing keynote session with Carl-Fredrik Mandrapa Olsson on Day 2 Session 5 of the conference.
Carl-Fredrik Mandrapa Olsson is the Head of Professional Services at Adfenix and works with a team of specialists in architecture tracking, digital marketing, analysis and implementing global best practices.
The Quest for Attribution
In a nutshell, the quest for attribution is connecting a marketing activity to an economic impact at the end of the activity itself, connecting key journey points like ‘why did we make this’ and ‘what is the ROI’, based on the activity carried out.
Attribution within the context of digital marketing
This involves revealing the chain of events between an activity and the economical impact that results from that activity. For a rudimentary example, this would be creating an ad for a local agent, having people click on that ad and signing up for a free evaluation.
However, in reality, it is much more complicated than that, especially within the real estate industry, because the decision cycle (that involves both buyers and sellers) has a comparatively much longer duration than decision cycles in other industries.
Why does this matter?
The reality is that almost no one has just one activity going on at any one time, but rather a wide variety of different activities that are taking place at the same time or parallel to one another, and all these activities have resources being invested into them. The challenge is -
- How do we accurately measure these activities working together?
- Which activities are bringing the most value?
- What is the synergy like between these activities?
- How are we investing resources going into each activity to drive real positive impact towards our desired business goals?
Working effectively with attribution means being able to remove the guesswork from all these questions and more, making it possible to invest resources into the activities that all work together to generate real sustainable, analysable, business value effectively over time.
Do most global real estate agencies work with attribution?
Attribution is extremely important, yet difficult to do correctly, and the simple answer is no, very little agencies do. The reasons for that can be boiled down to two points:
- A multitude of skills and expertise is needed - whether it be in-house or externally through a consultant (shortage of knowledge)
- The capacity needed to actually be able to extract the type of data needed from all different types of systems and identify where that data lives, can be an arduous and complicated process (shortage of software)
That said, a full attribution journey that is completely revealed and easily accessible is very rare even today, and there are parts of the journey still being discovered. The main issue is that all these types of data live in different systems, which is a complicated state in itself. The ideal solution would be to try and consolidate everything into one centred system where it would be possible to see how users behave before signup, what actions they take and which touchpoints they get to.
Should everyone within the organisation be able to understand this process?
Carl-Fredrik concludes that asking someone to understand attribution and be able to apply different attribution modeling is asking too much. What is more likely and feasible, however, is having someone at hand who is able to extract and relay the insight from such analysis. In fact, it will soon become essential to have such a person on the team in order to be on the forefront of digital marketing.
To sum up:
- The quest for attribution involves revealing the chain of events between an activity and the economical impact that results from that activity.
- No customer has just one activity going on at any one time, but rather a wide variety of different activities that are taking place at the same time or parallel to one another.
- Working effectively with attribution means being able to remove the guesswork, making it possible to invest resources into the activities that all work together to generate real business value that can be sustained and analysed over time.
- Very few agencies work with attribution, either due to shortage of knowledge or shortage or software power.
- While it is unlikely to have entire teams understand and process the value of attribution, agencies who do have someone at hand who is capable of doing the above will have a competitive edge when it comes to real estate digital marketing in the future.
About Real Conf.
Real Conf 2021 is a three-day virtual event exploring ways that agencies and brokerages can leverage the power of digital to increase business opportunities, elevate the brand, and empower agents to deliver success. The conference features hundreds of invaluable insight from keynote speakers, panel discussions and case studies from experts in the field.
All 15 sessions with 25 speakers are now available to stream on-demand.
Gain full access to the stream and watch the sessions in their entirety by signing up here: https://www.adfenix.com/real-conf
