The Best Item You Can Sell Is One That Isn't Attributed To A Marketing Channel

Spicy take forthcoming.

I once had a discussion with a Professional who told me his goal was to 100% attribute every single order to a marketing channel.

I couldn't possibly disagree more with anything in marketing/analytics than that take.

The percentage of orders you attribute to marketing is inversely proportional to the popularity of what you sell.

Now, some of you in the studio audience are going to say, "Hey, Meatball, word of mouth is a marketing channel and if you could properly attribute orders to word of mouth you'd realize word of mouth was the most powerful marketing channel and you'd want to give word of mouth credit for orders." You might be right. But we don't live in the world you created for me.

When I run a Marketing Budget Experiments project, it's always sad to see 90% of new customers attributed to paid search / PLAs / paid social etc. It suggests that the brand has so little to talk about (from a customer standpoint) that the brand must spend money to generate conversations that result in sales. It might be a VERY profitable approach to running a business, but it is not reflective of the brand selling anything compelling that a customer truly cares about.

When I analyze product preference, it's always fun to look at the items that sell by marketing channel, and where possible, to look at items that sell without attribution. Every single one of you should have a report at your disposal that rank-orders item sales by attributed / unattributed status.

If you possess that report, look at items that you deem to be "winners" and are sold at high levels without marketing attribution. Those are the items that people talk about. Those are the items that matter. That's the best item you can sell - you don't give up gross margin dollars via marketing efforts to generate a sale.