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Vice President Sales at LeadsRx
When marketers get marketing attribution right, it opens up a whole new world to them in terms of finding efficiency with spending.
However, the complexities of a multi-channel marketing team often lead to marketing attribution only showing a small piece of the puzzle. In this episode of Closing Time, meet Larry Todd of LeadsRx, a marketing attribution company.
Larry will talk through the power of cross-channel attribution (also called full-funnel attribution) and will give you the trends to look for in 2025.
Marketing attribution can feel like trying to piece together a puzzle with half the pieces missing. If you’re struggling to figure out where your marketing dollars are going and what’s actually driving results, you’re not alone.
According to Larry, one of the biggest challenges marketers face is trying to unify data that’s scattered across various ad platforms. “Marketers are overwhelmed by data that’s siloed,” Larry explains. With so many channels to manage—from paid ads to organic traffic to social media—gathering all that information into one place to make sense of it is difficult. And if you don’t have the right tools in place, it becomes almost impossible.
Marketers often make the mistake of relying on a single-touch attribution model—whether it’s first-touch, last-touch, or any other simplified approach. But the reality is that the customer journey is rarely that straightforward. People engage with brands in multiple ways across different channels, devices, and even over weeks or months. As Larry points out, “A layered, complex marketing approach is often driving the long-tail customer journey that leads to a conversion.”
The result? Many marketers end up missing key insights and optimizing for the wrong outcomes, focusing on short-term metrics like demo sign-ups or content downloads instead of the bigger picture—revenue.
Attribution isn’t just about tracking clicks or leads. It’s about understanding which marketing programs are driving the acquisition of your most valuable customers and making the greatest impact on your bottom line. Larry emphasizes that attribution becomes especially valuable when you’re dealing with a long customer journey, where multiple marketing programs are contributing to conversions.
“Whether it’s B2B, B2C, or direct-to-consumer, attribution is effective across a wide range of industries,” he says. However, it truly excels when brands use a multi-channel approach that spans both online and offline tactics. For instance, a combination of digital and traditional advertising can be linked back to customer behaviors if there’s some measurable online interaction. Without that anchor, though, tracking effectiveness can be tricky—especially for products sold in physical stores where foot traffic can’t be easily tied to a marketing campaign.
Consumer behavior is evolving. OTT (over-the-top) services, connected TV, and podcasts are becoming increasingly important channels for brands. These platforms offer the best of both worlds: the broad reach of traditional media with the targeting precision of digital marketing.
“With OTT and connected TV, you’re getting a more one-to-one engagement, closer to that of digital,” Larry explains. Unlike traditional broadcasting, where you might blast a message to a wide audience and hope it sticks, OTT allows marketers to deliver highly targeted messages to specific audiences. The same goes for podcasts, which continue to grow in popularity and offer a new way for brands to engage consumers.
As we move into 2025, Larry believes consumer privacy will continue to be a central issue. With third-party tracking becoming less effective due to cookie deprecation and tightening regulations, marketers will need to find new ways to track consumer behavior across devices and browsers.
One solution? A cookieless approach. This is where AI will play a critical role. According to Larry, AI will help unify customer journeys and establish anonymous persona behavior online. It will also be instrumental in optimizing for revenue, not just top-of-the-funnel metrics like click-through rates.
“Revenue attribution will become more important, as marketers will need to tie their efforts directly to the business outcomes that matter most—like sales and customer lifetime value,” he says. Attribution tools powered by AI will allow marketers to see the full customer journey and make real-time adjustments to their campaigns. This means marketers can optimize spend based on what’s truly working—and pivot quickly when something isn’t.
Looking ahead, Larry envisions AI taking attribution a step further by automating actionable insights. Imagine being able to set up automated bidding strategies or launch campaigns based on real-time attribution data. The ability to adjust your marketing mix on the fly, without waiting for a quarterly or even weekly analysis, will be a game-changer.
So, whether you’re tracking conversions across OTT platforms or just trying to understand how your various marketing programs contribute to revenue, attribution can help you get there. And as we head into 2025, the field is only going to get more advanced, allowing marketers to stay ahead of the curve.
Looking for some help converting marketing touches into revenue? Get a demo of LeadsRx’s multi-touch attribution software today.
If marketing attribution feels like a mystery to you. You are not alone. Let’s decode the terminology and learn about 2025 attribution trends. In this episode of Closing Time. Thanks for tuning in to closing. Time to show for go to market leaders. I’m Alex Nazarevich, VP of growth marketing for Insightly and Unbounce. Today I’m joined by Larry Todd, head of Leads Rx, a marketing attribution platform. Thanks for joining us, Larry. Hey, Alex. Great to be here. So, Larry, when marketers get attribution right, it opens up a whole new world in terms of finding efficiency with spend and understanding where to scale. So why do so many marketers get it wrong? Yeah. Great question. This gets at the crux of most of the conversations that I end up having with clients, which is the challenges that bring them to look at attribution in the first place. There’s so much information that is siloed across the ad serving platforms today. And the aggregation and arbitration of that data is giving marketers headaches and nightmares. So unifying that data, into a single place where you can take actionable insights, is extremely difficult and it’s resource intensive. And, most folks don’t have the tools in place to do that correctly today. We see marketers getting attribution wrong when they try to take a single touch approach to a way more complex customer journey. Consumers are engaging brands, in a ton of different ways today. And a lot of times, what you’re seeing when you’re measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns is a single touch model, first touch, last touch, and trying to assign credit to a marketing program that fits that space in the customer journey. When in fact, there was a layered, complex marketing approach that oftentimes drives a long tail customer journey through to a conversion that can span many different channels. It can span many different devices and browsers and can be, oftentimes over the span of days, weeks or months. The second challenge is, even if you’re solving for a part of that data puzzle and being able to unify information, a lot of times we see marketers measuring the wrong outcomes. And what I mean by that is not getting down to the most important business outcomes that a company cares about. Most oftentimes, that’s revenue. So if we’re optimizing to a trial sign up or a demo signup or a content download, or maybe even one single purchase, a lot of times that’s not going to tell you the whole customer story about the marketing programs that are driving the acquisition of your most valued customers and having the greatest impact on your most valuable business outcomes. That’s great. Thanks, Larry. So, what are some use cases where attribution really works well? To dovetail off of the last point is the scenarios that bring the most challenges are oftentimes the scenarios where attribution can bring the most value. That happens when there’s a lot of different marketing programs that are driving consumers to take action. There are oftentimes many different conversions that happen in a longer-tail customer journey through to an eventual bottom funnel conversion. But look, the use cases for attribution are wide and varied, right? Across B2B, B2C, direct to consumer. There’s a huge use case for agencies to deploy attribution across their entire, client roster broadcasters, publisher, partners. It all just depends on what lens you are taking, with attribution and what your end goal is. Attribution can be effective across almost any of those use cases. But the most value I see is a layered marketing approach that spans multiple channels, and is driving a consumer to take, some sort of digital action in path, to conversion. Now, there can be offline marketing programs as well as online and offline conversions, as well as online, but it’s really helpful to have some sort of measurable response online, to help anchor that customer journey too. There are some instances that provide more of a challenge where there is not a direct, measurable response. And I think, you know, we think about consumer packaged goods. So if you have a product that you are selling, strictly through big box retailers and, measuring the sales of that particular product and trying to tie that back to marketing campaigns is extremely difficult. There are things like foot traffic you can measure. But again, if I’m going into a Target or Walmart or another big box store, right, I could be going in to buy a whole bunch of different things. I may end up walking out with your product, but there’s no way we can tie that purchase to an individual and that individual back to marketing programs. And so when I talk about that measurable outcome or excuse me, that measurable, action, that is an important part, to link a consumer behavior back to a marketing program. And how are newer channels like OTT and streaming services showing up in attribution? Yeah. That’s, you know, we’ve seen an explosion in, OTT, connected TV. You know, podcast has been, popular for a while. And is still gaining popularity. You know, consumer behavior is changing, right? There’s more avenues to reach our customer, and there’s more avenues for our customer to reach our brands and engage with our brands. OTT, connected TV podcast – folks are consuming video and consuming audio in different ways than they have in the past. Broadcast radio is absolutely fantastic for evangelizing the brand. A lot of folks will take action as a result of broadcast ad exposure or linear TV ad exposure, but the the targeting that connected TV and podcast brings is a lot more of a one for one engagement closer to that of digital. And so you’re getting the value that audio consumption and, video consumption bring to the table. But in a lot more of a targeted one for one messaging as well as one for one digital action. And so where you used to have to blast a message out to a whole DMA, saying, take this particular call to action, connected TV and podcast allow you to evangelize that same message and measure, their response in, in more deterministic rather than probabilistic, model. The knock on attribution is that it can often be tactical, since it typically only focuses on one channel at a time. This is impractical for marketers since they’re typically responsible for multiple channels. Often, you know, 4 to 10 of them. So what would you say to someone if that’s what they had to say about attribution? Leads RX approaches attribution from a full-funnel, cross-channel perspective. If attribution is leveraged correctly, it should address the marketing mix from a full-funnel, cross-channel perspective. When done right, attribution will be leveraged to give more visibility cross-channel all the way through the funnel. Marketers are never at a shortage of data, right? The ad serving platforms do a fantastic job at giving you all of the data that you need for that particular channel in a siloed, sort of fragmented way. A lot of times that information is biased, right? The ad serving platform has a vested interest in ensuring that marketers maintain spend and potentially increase spend on those channels. The proper use of multi-touch attribution will bring an impartial, unbiased view into the entire marketing mix the entire way through the funnel. So whether it’s top, middle, or bottom of the funnel tactics, multi-touch attribution will bring visibility into all of those marketing touchpoints in a path to conversion. If this is done correctly, the marketer has the ability to truly understand what’s working well and what’s not working well within their marketing mix. Where to put more dollars, where to focus more attention, fail fast and pivot quickly. If you have, dipped your toes in the water into a marketing program that didn’t pan out too well right? So when that holistic view is employed, the right attribution tool, we’ll do a lot of that work for you. So what are some trends in attribution that we can expect in 2025 and beyond? Yeah. I think consumer privacy has been front and center for a while and will continue to be. I think it’s a sort of a cat and mouse game between, adtech and martech and some of the powers that be that want to, take certain actions to protect consumer privacy. And so that’s a battle that’s going to continue to rage. There’s third party tracking capabilities that have started to become less and less effective, less and less available to marketers. There’s been discussion of third party cookies coming and going. Google’s changed course on that for a long time, but that consumer privacy discussion will continue to rage because there’s a challenge in tying marketing tactics directly to consumers in the absence of some of those tracking capabilities. Now, some attribution solutions and measurement partners have been on the forefront of the approach to that for quite some time because the cookie deprecation conversation and a lot of the consumer privacy regulation conversations have been happening for a while. So what that is leading us to and will continue to lead us to is more of a cookieless approach to tracking consumer behavior cross-device, cross-browser and so on. That will continue to gain steam and AI will start to play more and more of a role in helping us unify customer journeys and establish anonymous, persona behavior online. There has been a push and this is what I’ve touched on a few times now in optimizing for revenue, revenue attribution, bottom of the funnel business outcome attribution. So instead of a lot of the proxy metrics looking at click through rates, looking at conversion rates to a top of the funnel conversion point, a demo request to trial, let’s follow that customer journey all the way through and attribute to revenue. Right? Let’s tribute to the most impactful business outcomes, that everybody cares about, not just the marketers. And that revenue attribution puzzle is going to become more complex and already has become quite complex with the introduction of of new channels like I had talked about – OTT, podcast, connected TV, streaming audio, but the unification of those channels into a centralized view of the customer journey will only become more and more and more important, and will be adopted at a wider scale moving through the year, It’s hard to say the true effect that AI is going to have in 2025 and beyond. And I think most folks can agree on that. But AI is going to definitely help with the unification of customer journeys and the identification of different types of consumers. But on the other side,. I think AI is going to start to play more of a pivotal role in the outcome piece of attribution. So taking actionable insights from the attribution analysis and putting those back into work, into your marketing campaigns, whether that’s helping you build out and deploy specific audiences, automated bidding based on, you know, optimization, within attribution, learning what’s truly working well and what’s not and changing, up and down, spend in near real time, based on those results. So the optimization of the attribution modeling in real time and the automation and optimization of output, I think is going to be one big piece. That’s great. Larry, that was super informative. Thank you so much for joining us today on Closing Time. Yeah.. Thanks for having me, Alex. Appreciate it. And thanks to all of you for tuning in. Remember to like this video, subscribe to this channel and ring the bell for notifications so you don’t miss an episode. We’ll see you next week on Closing Time.
