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- How to Create an Attribution Survey to Understand Your Customers’ Journeys
How to Create an Attribution Survey to Understand Your Customers’ Journeys
-
Barbara Bartucz
- Conversion
- 6 min read
Table of Contents
Want to get a better grasp on what brings customers to your website? Understanding your audience’s decision-making process is crucial if you want to fine-tune your marketing efforts.
That’s where an attribution survey comes in.
In this article, we’ll show you how to create an effective attribution survey that helps you discover the key touchpoints in your customer’s journey—whether it’s a social media ad, word of mouth, or an email campaign.
You’ll also learn how to use these insights to optimize your marketing strategy and drive better results.
Let’s dive in!
What are attribution surveys?
Attribution surveys are tools that directly ask customers what influenced their decision to interact with your brand or make a purchase.
These surveys help identify the marketing channels—like a Google Ads campaign, email newsletter, Google search, or good old-fashioned word of mouth—that made the most impact.
This insight is pure gold for marketers. It tells you which channels deserve a larger share of your budget and attention and helps you maximize your return on investment (ROI).
With attribution surveys, you’re not just guessing which touchpoints matter—you’re getting the answers straight from your customers.
A typical example of an attribution survey could be a post-purchase survey that asks, “Where did you hear about us?”
Easy, right? Now, let’s walk through how you can create one for your own business.
How to create an attribution survey?
Building an attribution survey is easier than you think, especially with tools like OptiMonk, which allow you to design custom surveys using popups.
Follow this simple guide to create a survey that will give you actionable insights.
Step 1: Choose a template
OptiMonk offers ready-to-use popup templates that you can customize based on your needs. These templates are designed to ask the right questions to help you gather the data you need about your customers’ journeys.
You can explore some premade options here:
Step 2: Customize the popup
Once you’ve chosen a template, it’s time to tweak it. Tailor your questions to fit your audience and their journey with your brand.
For instance, you could ask something specific like, “What was the most influential touchpoint in your decision to purchase?”
Also, you can use OptiMonk’s drag-and-drop editor to customize the design, ensuring it fits seamlessly into your brand’s style.
Step 3: Set up triggers for your popup
Timing is everything! With OptiMonk, you can choose when your survey will pop up—whether it’s immediately after a purchase or once a customer has visited multiple pages on your site.
The key here is to trigger the survey at a point where the customer is most likely to remember their journey clearly.
Step 4: Launch the survey
Once everything’s set, hit that launch button and start collecting data! The insights you gather will help you make smarter marketing decisions.
How to analyze the survey data?
So, you’ve launched your post-purchase popup asking about attribution, and now the responses are coming in. Time to analyze the data!
Survey results will typically fall into two categories:
- quantitative data
- qualitative data
Quantitative responses are the ones you can count, like the number of people who said a social media ad was their first touchpoint.
Qualitative data includes more detailed, open-ended feedback like, “I heard about you from a friend.”
To make sense of both types of data, look for patterns. Are new customers consistently mentioning one channel as the most influential?
Do certain touchpoints keep popping up as the last step before a purchase?
These insights will help you better understand your marketing performance and fine-tune your marketing spend.
How to refine customer journeys based on survey insights?
An attribution survey is more than just a data collection tool. It offers a roadmap for refining your marketing efforts and enhancing the customer experience.
Data-based insights from these surveys are crucial for effectively winning customers and driving growth.
1. Optimize your marketing strategy
Survey insights will highlight which touchpoints are most effective.
If your social media ads are consistently mentioned as the driving force behind purchases, it’s time to allocate more of your budget there. Increasing ad spend can attract higher-quality leads (and more of them). Improving your ad campaigns by adapting marketing strategies based on customer journey data is a smart way to improve your ROI.
On the flip side, if certain digital channels aren’t performing, you may want to rethink how you’re using them (and whether you might consider ditching them altogether).
2. Personalize customer experiences
Understanding the customer’s journey also allows you to personalize your messaging.
For instance, if customers find you through blog posts, they might prefer more educational content. But if they come from Instagram, perhaps you should lean into visually rich, bite-sized messaging.
3. Close journey gaps
Attribution surveys can reveal pain points in the customer journey.
If you notice a lot of customers dropping off after a certain touchpoint, that’s a sign something needs fixing. It could be an issue with your checkout process, or maybe you need better follow-up after a sale.
4 best practices for attribution surveys
Ready to get started with attribution surveys? Keep these best practices in mind:
1. Keep it short and focused
The shorter the survey, the higher the completion rate. Attention spans are limited, and asking too many questions can lead to survey fatigue.
Stick to just a few key questions that directly focus on identifying marketing touchpoints, like asking customers where they heard about your product or what influenced their decision to purchase.
2. Incentivize participation
Customers are more likely to complete a survey if there’s something in it for them. Offering a small reward, like a discount code, free shipping, or entry into a giveaway, can boost participation rates dramatically.
Keep in mind that the incentive doesn’t need to be large, but it should be relevant and enticing to your audience.
3. Test before launching
Before you launch, test your survey to ensure everything is clear and simple. A confusing or poorly timed survey can result in unreliable data or, worse, customer frustration.
Also, make sure your survey works smoothly across all devices. Mobile-friendly surveys are a must for capturing data from on-the-go customers.
4. Continuously evolve the survey
Customer journeys evolve, and so should your survey. As you introduce new marketing channels, partnerships, or campaigns, update your questions to capture these shifts.
For example, if you start investing in influencer marketing or new advertising platforms, make sure to add questions that can help attribute conversions to these efforts.
Wrapping up
An attribution survey is a powerful way to get direct insights into your customers’ journeys. By asking the right questions and analyzing the data effectively, you can optimize your marketing strategy, personalize customer experiences, and close gaps in the journey.
Don’t forget to keep your survey simple and tweak it as your marketing efforts grow. These two aspects are essential for staying ahead in an ever-changing landscape.
Now, it’s time to put these surveys to work and start getting the answers you need to take your marketing game to the next level—create your free OptiMonk account today and start building your first attribution survey!
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Barbara Bartucz
- Posted in
- Conversion
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