I am very excited to announce Attribution by ActiveCampaign!
Attribution is a new way to track the complete customer lifecycle and take action on it, right from your ActiveCampaign account.
With Attribution by ActiveCampaign, you will be able to quickly visualize how your contacts are interacting with your marketing and advertising efforts.

Define and Track Conversions


Get started by defining conversion events inside your ActiveCampaign account, and assigning a value to each conversion event.
A conversion event can be anything you want, some examples are; visited a key webpage, purchased an item from your store, downloaded a lead magnet, and more.
Once you have your conversion events defined, ActiveCampaign will automatically measure the traffic sources, campaigns, keywords and other components of the marketing and advertising efforts that lead to that conversion.
Once you have defined your conversion events, you can quickly search for contacts that have achieved a conversion event, and use the segment builder to search for contacts that have or have not achieved a conversion event.

Since this is a part of the ActiveCampaign segment builder, you will have access to this search and filtering functionality everywhere you have access to the segment builder itself. Including inside of Automations, when creating campaigns, and more.
You can also see the details about the conversion events a contact has achieved, and the marketing and advertising efforts that lead up to that conversion event from within the contact profile. Quickly see what factors are helping drive your business forward.
Attribution integrates closely with the ActiveCampaign segment builder, so that you can search for contacts that have achieved a specific conversion.

Measure marketing and advertising efforts with touchpoints

Once you have defined your conversion events in settings, you can begin to glance into which of your marketing and advertising campaigns are working.
ActiveCampaign does this by parsing the same UTM parameters Google Analytics, and countless other marketing platforms use to track your traffic sources.
ActiveCampaign will automatically parse and store the 5 most common UTM_ tracking parameters;

  • utm_source
  • utm_medium
  • utm_campaign
  • utm_term
  • utm_content

If you are new to utm_ tracking parameters, we have put together this helpful guide to get you started.
No changes are required on your end to get started, other than to verify that you are using these utm_ tracking parameters wherever possible.
You can quickly view which touchpoints a contact interacted with from on their path to conversion, by visiting their contact detail page. If the user has visited your site or clicked a tracked link, it will either show up in the “Conversions” tab or the “Unconverted Sources.”

Like conversions, touchpoints are also available to use inside the segment builder, and therefore anywhere you find the segment builder inside ActiveCampaign; automations, campaign creator, etc…

This makes it easy to quickly segment your contacts and match up to create messaging that cohesively matches with marketing campaigns that resonated with your contacts.

Trigger conversions a number of ways

When setting up conversion events with this new ActiveCampaign attribution feature, you can trigger a conversion several different ways;

  • When a url matches a pattern
  • using ActiveCampaign event tracking
  • Manually via JavaScript
  • From inside an automation

All of these different ways to track conversions, makes it extremely flexible, and powerful to measure what part of the customer lifecycle is working, and take action that continues to provide a personalized experience for your customers based on their needs.

Getting Started

Attribution is available to anybody on the Professional plan or higher. The Attribution upgrade is rolling out to all eligible accounts now, and should be available to everyone in the next couple of days.
To get started, make sure that any touchpoints you want tracked are using the appropriate utm parameters. If you want to measure the results of your email campaigns, make sure that Google Analytics is configured for every email that you want to track.

Make sure all external traffic sources, like ads, or links from other websites, are utilizing the appropriate utm_ parameters as well.
The good news, is that you are likely already using these utm_ parameters wherever appropriate, so that you can measure the impact in Google Analytics, Amplitude, or whatever other tools you are using.
The one place you may not be using the utm_ parameters however, is in Google AdWords. AdWords recently switched to using the gclid parameter, a single parameter that measures all of the ad data.
You can continue to use the gclid parameter in AdWords, so long as you first append the appropriate utm_ parameters as well.
For more information on getting started with Attribution, check out the Attribution section of our help docs.

Read the docs

Example of personalization based on Attribution

A local Chicago photographer is running several different AdWords campaigns, based on the type of photography she offers, and the neighborhoods the ads are targeting.
The primary objective of the ad campaigns is to generate leads for her business, using a pricing pdf as a lead magnet.
Once the lead is generated, ActiveCampaign handles the lead nurturing component with a sequence of automations.
Using Attribution, the photographer is able to quickly personalize the lead nurturing sequence, based on attributes from the touchpoints that lead to the conversion event.
For example, imagine if the contact clicks on an ad for a “Wicker Park Newborn photographer,” but doesn’t convert on the custom landing page. A couple of days later, the contact searches for the photographers name, clicks an organic link, and ends up on the home page. After browsing a few pages, the contact downloads the generic lead magnet.
ActiveCampaign’s Attribution feature knows that the contact previously clicked on an AdWords ad for a Wicker Park newborn photographer. The photographer can then personalize the lead nurturing automation based on that information, to provide hyper-relevant messaging during the lead nurturing sequence.
For example, during the lead nurturing sequence, the contact is prompted to book a free consultation at a local coffee shop.
Since the contact is expecting the photographer to serve the Wicker Park area, the recommended coffee shop for this contact will be a local coffee shop in the Wicker Park neighborhood.
Additionally, the lead nurturing sequence will focus mostly on the photographer’s credibility as a newborn photographer, and less so the photographer’s strength in other services (maternity, family, wedding, etc…)

What’s next

We are really excited about the groundwork Attribution lays out for the future of the ActiveCampaign platform. Attribution is the necessary first step in building an intelligent and elegant system for working with marketers to provide them with the information they need to optimize their customer lifecycle, from initial touchpoint (awareness) to referral.
Attribution makes it possible for us to develop a sophisticated reporting and recommendation engine so that marketers have the information to close more deals faster with less work than ever before.
Keep your eyes peeled to this blog, or join our Facebook or Slack groups to stay in the loop.