Author: Mallory Lee

First: Let's talk Attribution: 

With a deep background in marketing operations, I’ve been fighting with attribution models for about 15 years. When I check out solutions like Align.ly Attribution, I can’t help but think back to ExactTarget days when we created a home-grown SQL model run by the infamous Michael Spellmeyer to nitpick every dollar invested in our $30M+ marketing budget. It was innovative, but MAN was it slow, confusing, and complicated. 

Attribution has gotten a bad reputation for being overly complicated. And it’s extremely easy to double-count credit in traditional methods. Before you know it, marketing has influenced $50M in New ARR when the sales team only closed $10M... Not good. 

So should we even bother with campaign influence and complex attribution at all? I’ve asked myself and others – the ultimate answer is Yes, we need to know which content and channels create demand, convert demand, and accelerate demand in our pipeline. If we keep it simple, and look for important trends instead of exact cause and effect, we can create an effective attribution program that leadership will actually pay attention to. With this big question out of the way, let’s review Align.ly, a lightweight attribution platform that does it right. 

Align.ly's Solution:

Align.ly is a point solution in the best possible way. It accomplishes campaign attribution and it’s not trying to overdo anything else. It is part of a suite of tools. Founder Andrew Nadeau built the app 100% native to Salesforce for easy integration into your normal reporting. 

Align.ly leverages the campaign and campaign member objects. The member object is way more powerful than you think, and Andrew figured out how to make it all work. Every single membership (or touchpoint) has a unique value assigned for influence so that they can be added together without dreaded over-counting. 

The tool comes with 5 models out of the box, and Andrew suggests comparing them side-by-side so that marketers can apply judgment in the analysis. The 5 models are first touch, last touch, time decay, u-shaped, and evenly weighted influence.

Here are the big differentiators as I see them: 

• This thing can be up and running in as little as an hour - seriously 
• The reporting is retroactive. You instantly get historical views
• The tool leverages a custom “engagement date” so you can adjust bad data, or use a more accurate date for a list upload – Everyone is bound to have some fixing to do once they get the tool going
• Align.ly has a playbook and capabilities to track the UTM values for leads on the member. This reduces the number of campaigns you need because channel info is available without duplicating the same campaign and just tagging a channel name on the end (yes I’ve done that) 
• Reporting can focus on account-wide attribution and/or just the contact roles on the opportunity for a more narrow view (they are available side by side) 
• Align.ly also splits out touches that sourced a lead or opportunity, vs. accelerated it
• Andrew is an expert in the space, and that makes a big difference too.

Align.ly leverages standard Salesforce reporting to create some pretty compelling analysis on full-funnel sourcing and attribution - check out the screenshot below. 

It all sounds expensive but it’s not. The tool currently costs $4K per year with no limits on anything at all. In recent years I have not found something with as much value packed into such a great price point.  

Room for Improvement: 

Some things for you to consider as you work on attribution and consider Align.ly:

1. Today, it’s a Salesforce-only solution. So, if you use Hubspot for marketing purposes, that’s fine - just make sure you are using the Salesforce campaign member functionality. 
2. In our noisy “signal” world, not all signals are making into campaign memberships. That could create blind spots for marketing investments such as account-based ads where it’s not as straightforward to automatically put the right person into a campaign. 
3. PLG companies have to take extra steps to make sure that important product events get recognized as campaign members, if you want that user journey to be part of your analysis on what kind of touches accelerate deals. Not everyone looks at product usage this way though.
4. You still need to schedule the app’s “job” that runs all of the numbers. While this does not consume API calls (big win), the need to be patient for an hour might annoy some people. That said, the job can be run manually in the UI whenever you please and then your only wait is for the data to process.

What is Next? 

I asked Andrew if a Hubspot CRM app was on his radar, but he did not confirm that it’s on the roadmap. I suspect it might need to happen down the road, but today this tool is Salesforce-only. Personally I can’t wait to see what kind of awesome point solution Andrew will cook up next. Stay tuned for other reviews for Alignl.ly Beacon, Lead to Account Matching, and Contact Role. (the rest of the Align.ly suite of apps) All equally powerful and purpose-built. 

Disclosures: none!