Before we talk more about the marketing mix, we gotta talk about marketing attribution. In order to make any decision really, you need to know where your business is coming from. I haven’t really met a shop at any size that can confidently tell me what % of their business came from referral, organic, paid search, etc.
Sure they’ll have a general idea, and they’re usually fairly right on the big lines, but they lack the granular data that would allow them to make an informed decision. And without easy, regular access to the data, it’s easy to start operating on vibes. We all end up doing it in one way or another, the most important is to recognize it and allow ourselves to snap out of it.
With marketing, that can quickly become a very costly decision, and lead you to focus on the wrong part of your business. The number itself usually will point you in the right direction, too.
For example, if you expected events to bring in 15% of revenue and they brought in 7%, you're just not going out enough, or you don't act the right way when you're out. If they brought in 13%, it might just be about being more diligent on follow-ups.
02About Marketing Attribution
The bigger the business, the more difficult it gets to accurately track marketing attribution. It’s such a critical function that Fortune 500s will spend millions of dollars every year on software and entire departments with the one task to accurately attribute marketing results.
In a small business like an automotive restyling shop, even with multiple locations, marketing attribution can be as close to perfect as I’ve seen it in my career. If you properly link your Google Ads, have the right UTM tags in the right places, Google Analytics being used correctly and a well maintained CRM, I can tell you down to a few percent of accuracy where every dollar you made came from.
This should be the baseline, but it really isn’t. And not having this data makes it exponentially difficult to make the right decisions. It might seem like a lot of work, and it is if you’re missing a few of the pieces, but this kind of system truly pays for itself so many times over.
Beyond being able to attribute your budget the right way, marketing attribution also tells you the next step to take with a customer, especially once they’re closed. Once you have the right data, you can start to really have fun and act differently based on the information you have.
For example, Google reviews are the lifeblood of this industry, a steady flow of them is an essential ranking factor in local SEO and map pack positioning. No shop is getting enough of them.
Well, if your salesperson knows that this customer came from Google when they pick up their car, they can make a way more convincing case when asking for a review: “I can see here that you initially found us on Google, so you’ll really understand how important they are to our business, would you mind doing that right now, there’s a QR code here that will take you right to it.”
Knowing your data and making it readily available can transform your business completely. It also gives your staff a different perspective that might influence the way they do their job in the future.
03All My Homies Hate Meta (And Google)
You’d think that because you spend a lot of money on ad platforms, they’d give you accurate data, right? It’s literally the opposite, they’ll straight up lie to you and attribute conversions to them with the thinnest proof they have. Meta is by far the biggest offender in double counting conversions, but Google is just as bad, in different ways.
Meta is big on taking credit for anyone who saw an ad the day before, and anyone who clicked in the past week, even if they would have found you anyway. Google is more about counting anything and everything as a conversion, they do let you change it to accurate triggers, but they lose marks for not being set up that way natively.
Like I said, I really don’t believe in Meta as a channel for this industry, it’ll need its own blog post. Google Ads, on the other end, can be wrangled in a specific way to be accurate, and we can definitely get accurate data from this platform using what’s called a click ID, a GCLID.
That GCLID connects each lead back to the exact search they made. Once that information is carried over to your CRM, it all becomes data points you can use down the line to inform your future marketing strategy and how you interact with these customers.
04The Minimum Setup
You don’t have to jump in right away with a super complex setup, it can be as simple as:
- A source recorded on every job, from a fixed list of options
- Ask every customer how they found you, every time
- The ad click ID stored on the deal in your CRM
- Reconcile monthly against revenue
These are simple setups and habits you can add right away and really improve the way you run your business. If you want to go further and really get data that allows you to segment your customer base further:
- Why they said no
- What they declined even if they booked something
- Last service date
- What made them choose us?
- Where they're at in the pipeline (healthy pipeline management in general)
- Referral potential
Some of this data you might already have, but most owners don’t want to use it because they feel like they can’t rely on it. And that’s the dark side of data management: If you don’t trust that data was accurately and diligently collected, how can you ever rely on it?
Some of it, like click IDs, are a question of setup, the others are mostly on you and your sales staff. Thankfully, it can all be answered by having a bit of curiosity in your customer. Ask them questions, it makes people feel valued and gives you valuable data.
05What You’ll Probably Learn
I’ve done a lot of tracking implementation in this industry, and I almost always find the same things. Paid media feels like your biggest source of revenue, but it’s only your biggest source of leads, big difference.
A lot of shops don’t realize just how many referrals they get because they just don’t have a good way to track it or just don’t ask. Your position in the map pack on Google is doing a LOT more heavy lifting than you think. Owners reaching out to their top spending clients and asking them if they got a new car recently almost has a 100% close rate.
The point here isn’t for me to tell you you’re being wrong about how you run your business. I just want you to operate on sound data, and for everyone to act on the same information. It’s impossible to have an accurate representation of what is actually running your business without taking a step back to account for the entire operation.
06The Test
The best way to start is to realize how far you have to go with a simple test. Go in your CRM, filter it by month, and try to fill in as many of the fields in the list above. If you can’t attach a direct data point to the answer, that’s a problem and you should work on fixing it.
The results of this test will tell you which of the measures I spoke about you need to put in place, and enforce. This will become a test that you will do every month for a while, and every time you’re missing information, ask your staff why it’s not there. Or ask yourself why you didn’t ask the customers those questions.
This might seem silly, but often the smallest levels of accountability like this are the most revealing. If it’s as easy as a question, what else am I not doing? Is there a deeper problem to take care of here?
I know it sounds lame as hell, but the success of your business is directly tied to the quality of your data. Don’t let something so simple drag you down. Marketing attribution should be what drives your business.