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SaaS SEO attribution: A definitive guide

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SaaS marketing attribution: What it is and what it measures

When it comes to knowing how successful your marketing efforts are, the big picture is the easy part. If you see a boost to your sales figures following a campaign push, you can easily connect the two.

But how do you know which elements of your campaign packed the most punch? How can you tell which channels were the most effective at encouraging conversions, and which failed to land?

These are important questions to answer, because it’s only by drilling down into the detail that you’ll be able to pin down what’s working. And, in turn, be able to adjust and refine your marketing approach to ensure greater success in the future.

This is where marketing attribution comes in.

Marketing attribution is a crucial element of any successful online sales strategy. It involves applying a best-fit model to the customer journey to establish which marketing channels deserve the most credit for any given conversion. It then assigns a percentage value to each touchpoint according to how much of the total credit it accounts for.

How does it do that? Well, that’s the trickier part.

In an ideal world, you’d have perfect information about which touchpoints were the most effective for any given customer. But that’s not the reality we operate in. The typical customer journey is complex and meanders through a crowded field of touchpoints, some of which are easier to track than others.

A visual example of a typical customer journey and the touchpoints it may include

Marketing attribution has been a puzzle for decades, even before the advent of the digital era. Think of how difficult it would be to connect a sale with a single view of an offline billboard, for example, and you can begin to see the problem.

Old-school methods of collecting marketing effectiveness data relied on surveys, none of which were particularly accurate. Yet, analog outdoor advertising thrived, even though marketers couldn’t be sure how well it was working. On one level, they simply had to assume it was making some kind of positive contribution, and hope for the best.

These days, we’re in a much better position, particularly with regard to tracking online metrics. Thanks to the power of SEO, SaaS companies and other digital-first businesses have much more information at their fingertips.

Because you can now see where your customers are coming from and what they do once they reach your site, it’s possible to have a deeper understanding of how they act. In turn, this makes marketing attribution a bit easier to do.

Even in this brave new data-driven world, though, there are still challenges to assigning market attribution accurately. But we’ve reached a point now where implementing this process can help generate genuinely useful insights, as long as it’s applied with care.

So let’s dig a little deeper into how it works, and why SEO is the cornerstone of the process.

Why is SEO crucial in SaaS marketing attribution?

The key to understanding this is remembering that when you get traffic from organic search, it tells you a lot about your customers and what stage they’re at in their journey.

When a potential customer types out a search request and then clicks through to your site from the SERP, that’s often the first direct touchpoint they have with your business.

We need to bear in mind how dominant Google is in the search space. It accounts for over 92% of all search queries worldwide:

Graph showing the search engine market share worldwide

This means that when you’re thinking about marketing attribution, making use of Google Analytics for SEO is vital.

With that in place, just by looking at search request data, you immediately know some combination of these details:

What products or services customers are looking for
What pages of your site they land on
Which other pages they visit
How long they stay
The percentage of visits that are new sessions (i.e., from first-time visitors)
Average number of pages per session
Number of conversions or goal completions

By analyzing this data and mapping it to the marketing funnel, you’re already off to a great start. You can begin to build up a picture of how organic search is bringing in customers and how likely they are to convert. This gives you a handle on where you should be thinking about focusing your SEM and SEO budgets.

Another crucial point about SEO is how good it is as a basic fuel for optimizing other techniques.

Ideally, you should be using a mixture of complementary methods to get the best result. For example, cohort analysis can tell you how the behavior of different subgroups of your audience changes over time. This can give you a deeper insight into the evolving importance of different marketing channels.

Research approaches that work hand-in-hand with SEO metrics include:

Customer surveys
A/B testing
Brand testing
Measuring channel-specific metrics

With solid SEO data in your pocket, you’re well placed to begin figuring out which channels are working best for your business. But how should you apply this knowledge to arrive at a robust SEO attribution model for your marketing attribution analysis?

The answer—as it so often does—depends on the nature of your business. The exact attribution model you should choose will vary according to your circumstances.

The pros and cons of different SaaS marketing attribution models

The models used can be broadly divided into two categories: Single-touch and multi-touch attribution models.

A single-touch model will assign all the credit of the conversion to a single touchpoint. Meanwhile, a multi-touch one will spread the credit between two or more.

When you’re deciding which model to use, it’s best to approach the problem through the lens of the marketing funnel. This helps keep a focus on the customer journey and the relationships between the different stages of the process.

Visual representation of the SaaS marketing funnel

Single-touch models tend to be the simplest to apply, but aren’t particularly detailed, so their usefulness can be limited. The most common of these are:

First-touch attribution

In this model, the first touchpoint between business and customer is given 100% of the credit for the eventual conversion. For example, imagine a customer searches on Google for a particular business service, then clicks through to a site providing it.

If they eventually buy the service, even if it’s through a different route, that Google search would be given 100% of the credit for the sale. First-touch attribution therefore has a very top-of-funnel focus. It’s best used by businesses that rely on trial sign-ups, since that initial contact is one of the most important factors driving conversions.

Last-touch attribution

Similarly, this model assigns 100% to a single touchpoint, but in this case, it’s the final one.

If a customer searches for a product, signs up to an email list, then later clicks through and buys the product through a link in a marketing email, that final clickthrough will get 100% of the credit.

There are obvious limitations here. After all, the customer would never have signed up in the first place were it not for that initial Google search. Nevertheless, this is a popular model because it’s easy to use and can yield some beneficial insights.

If your product has a relatively short sales cycle with only a couple of touchpoints in the process, a last-touch attribution model can be useful. It helps distinguish between the effectiveness of particular final-stage touchpoints.

In the SaaS business, though, sales cycles are typically quite long.

So, most CMO strategy decisions about marketing attribution models tend to favor multi-touch attribution of one kind or another. These can be more complex to apply, but typically allow for more detailed analysis. They include:

Linear attribution

Each touchpoint on the customer journey is credited with an equal share of the credit. So, if there were four identifiable touchpoints, each one would be considered 25% responsible for achieving the conversion.

What this essentially does is just list all the touchpoints. It assumes that every touchpoint in the customer journey had an equal hand in closing the sale.

So, it’s useful if what you want to do is catalog all the ways your customers found you. This can indeed be important for companies with a long sales cycle like SaaS businesses, but it obviously ignores the relative importance of each touchpoint.

Time-decay attribution

One way of tackling the weighting issue is to factor in the importance of time. It gives more credit to more recent touchpoints.

You can choose the weighting yourself, but a typical example might look like this:

First touchpoint: 10%
Lead creation touchpoint: 15%
Qualified lead touchpoint: 25%
Conversion touchpoint: 50%

Visual representation of the time-decay attribution method of SaaS SEO attribution

This can be a useful attribution model, because you’ll be able to track the customer journey as it evolves. However, it can still mean that those crucial early touchpoints during the awareness stage of the funnel are underrated.

Position-based attribution

An alternative approach to weighting in a SaaS attribution model is to give more importance to the first and last touchpoints.

This makes sense, since it gives greater credit to the touchpoint that captured the customer’s attention in the first place and the one that resulted in the final conversion.

So, like this, for instance:

First touchpoint: 40%
Lead creation touchpoint: 10%
Qualified lead touchpoint: 10%
Conversion touchpoint: 40%

Visual representation of the position-based attribution method of SaaS SEO attribution

Other models

You may come across some less commonly used models that nevertheless can be very valuable.

This would include what’s known as the Markov Chain model, which creates a connection between touchpoints by factoring in the probability of conversion depending on which touchpoints came before others.

There’s also the data-driven model, which is a more recent arrival. It applies machine learning to large datasets to analyze which touchpoints are the most important.

So, it addresses the problem of subjectivity that can plague the other models and is therefore the most accurate, but it requires a lot of resources to use.

Which is the best model for SaaS?

As we’ve already pointed out, this will depend on your precise business model.

Most SaaS businesses work to long sales cycles, so first-touch attribution is unlikely to suit, unless you’re very specifically focused on initial sign-ups for eventual conversions. Of the single-touch models, last-touch tends to be a better choice for most SaaS operators.

One key point is that SaaS sales cycles often stretch beyond the 90-day limit Google Analytics allows for tracking time before conversion. In fact, it’s not unusual for a full sales cycle to last six months or more.

This is a problem, because if you decide to go with multi-touch attribution, you need good data to implement it accurately. But, if conversions are happening long after a customer first becomes a qualified lead, you could be basing your attribution on incomplete data.

The best way to tackle this is to break the SaaS marketing attribution process down into two stages. The first can be done using attribution in Google Analytics. This is where you track your customer from the point of first touch to becoming a qualified lead. Then, you should use your CRM to track the path from qualified lead to conversion.

Putting the two of these together by tracking every point of contact will give you a much more comprehensive idea of the customer journey. In turn, this will make it much easier to carry out attribution effectively.

Leverage SaaS SEO attribution for an ROI boost

You work hard on your SEO. And for good reason. Techniques like SaaS backlinks link building and effective keyword analysis are crucial to getting your business ranking on that elusive first page.

Taking things one step further with insightful SaaS SEO attribution can give your business what it needs to supercharge its marketing ROI. With some careful planning and a deep dive into the customer journey, you can adapt your strategy and achieve even better results in the future.