Mastering Multi Touch Revenue Attribution HubSpot for Better Insights

What is Attribution Reporting and Why is it Important?

Understanding how your marketing initiatives influence customer decisions is crucial for any growth-focused business. That’s where attribution reporting comes in.

Attribution reporting is the process of analyzing which marketing activities are making the biggest impact on your deal revenue and lead flow.

Attribution reports provide valuable insights into how different marketing efforts impact your lead generation and revenue. They help answer critical questions like:

• Which campaigns are driving the most engagement?
• Which touchpoints are influencing purchases the most?

Multi-touch attribution takes this a step further by tracking every major interaction a prospect has with your business throughout their journey. This deeper analysis means you can make smarter, data-driven decisions for your sales team to maximize ROI by understanding a contact's interactions throughout their journey.

These reports also provide insights into the conversion path, detailing the various stages and interactions leading to the final conversion.

At the heart of this process are attribution models, which often focus on the last interaction. These frameworks distribute “credit” for conversions across various touchpoints such as website visits, email interactions, and sales conversations.

Here’s a basic example of how a customer journey might look:

Understanding Attribution Models

The most basic attribution models are first touch and last touch. In each of these cases, only one touchpoint is awarded credit for a goal conversion.

However, this is very likely to give you a misleading picture of what actually happened in the customer’s journey to that point.

For example, say your customer read a blog post that they found via organic search, then went away from your site. They came back later with a direct visit and viewed some conversion interactions. Later, they sign up for a webinar. After the webinar, they take out a demo. They later see an organic social post, and click through to purchase.

In a first-touch model, the organic blog post would get all of the credit. And with last touch, the social post takes the credit. But these models ignore the crucial role played by the middle interactions, such as the webinar and demo pages consumed in-between.

So, you might choose a multi-touch attribution model to ensure a broader and more holistic picture of your deal pipeline.

Here are some key multi-touch attribution models:

• Linear attribution: Assigns equal credit to every interaction leading up to a conversion. It assigns deal revenue credits to interactions equally.
• Time-decay attribution: Gives more credit to the most recent interactions. It gives more weight to recent interactions.
• U-shaped attribution: Emphasizes the first interaction and the moment a lead was created. It emphasizes lead conversion interactions. Sometimes referred to as the bathtub model.
• W-shaped attribution: Credits the first interaction, lead creation, and deal creation events more heavily.
• J-shaped attribution: Gives most credit to the final interaction, the second-most credit to the first interaction, and remaining credit split evenly across the other touchpoints.

Choosing the right model depends on your specific marketing goals. For example, if you’re focused on early funnel activities like brand awareness, a U-shaped model might offer the most insight.

Attribution Reporting in HubSpot

With customizable options in HubSpot, businesses can tailor reports to track the specific metrics that matter most. It might be website sessions, email conversions, or demo requests.

Multi-touch attribution reports provide a comprehensive view of the buyer's journey, showing how different activities work together to drive conversions.

Meanwhile, revenue attribution reports zero in on what’s bringing real dollars into the business, helping you double down on the most profitable channels.

HubSpot Multi-Touch Attribution

HubSpot’s multi-touch attribution features allow you to track how multiple touchpoints contribute to lead generation and closed deals.

With HubSpot, you can:

• Customize attribution models based on your business needs.
• View detailed customer journeys from first touch to closed deal.
• Analyze the performance of individual marketing assets and channels, like blog posts, emails, social posts, and paid ads.

This flexible approach gives marketing, sales, and RevOps teams deeper insight into the effectiveness of campaigns without needing heavy manual data analysis.

How to Build Multi-Touch Attribution Reports in HubSpot

Follow these steps to get started:

1. Navigate to reports. Log in to your HubSpot account and click on “Reports” in the main navigation bar. Discover top apps that integrate seamlessly with HubSpot to enhance your CRM capabilities and productivity.

2. Create a new report. Select “Create report” and choose “Attribution.” You can then select the report you want to see (“Contact Create”, “Deal Create”, or “Revenue Create).

1. Select an attribution model. In the report builder, choose the attribution model that aligns with your goals. HubSpot offers multiple options: First Touch, Last Touch, Linear, U-Shaped, and Time Decay. For a more complete view of the customer journey, I recommend using one of the multi-touch options like Linear or U-Shaped to credit multiple interactions. Additionally, for optimizing your use of HubSpot, learn how to effectively define and manage contact properties to enhance your marketing efforts.

1. Apply filters to narrow your data. You might filter by:
   • Date range
   • Specific marketing campaigns
   • Lifecycle stages (e.g., leads, opportunities, customers)
2. Visualize the data. HubSpot lets you build tables, bar charts, line graphs, and more. Choose a layout that makes it easy to spot patterns and trends.
3. Save and share your report. You can share it with your team or schedule it to be delivered automatically on a weekly or monthly basis.
4. Analyze and optimize. Use your new report to identify which channels, campaigns, and touchpoints drive real results. Then refine your strategy based on what’s working best.

Best Practices for Attribution Analysis

Mastering multi-touch attribution and marketing strategies takes time and continuous refinement. Here are a few best practices:

• Review attribution reports regularly: Marketing trends and buyer behaviors change, so your analysis should too.
• Use UTM parameters: Tagging your URLs ensures precise source tracking and attribution.
• Experiment with multiple models: Different models reveal different insights. Compare them to get a holistic view of which channels and campaigns are impacting your performance.
• Focus on both leads and revenue: Analyze attribution not just by number of leads, but also by the revenue those leads generate, to get a clearer picture of what’s working.
• Identify effective channels: Use multi-touch attribution to analyze various interactions and understand which touchpoints contribute significantly to conversions. This allows for more strategic allocation of resources and optimization of marketing efforts.
• Reallocate more resources: Optimize your marketing strategies by reallocating focus and budget towards high-performing channels. Monitor conversion rates and tailor your marketing efforts based on data analysis to enhance overall campaign effectiveness.

Combining these practices with HubSpot’s powerful attribution tools helps you unlock deeper insights and drive more targeted, high-impact marketing efforts through effective landing pages.

Attribution can feel overwhelming at first, but starting with a few key metrics and models can offer quick wins. As your HubSpot analysis grows more sophisticated, so will your ability to maximize marketing ROI across every touchpoint.