topic Re: Let's Boil Down Attribution Reporting in Reporting & Analytics

Let's Boil Down Attribution Reporting

katie_cort — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 18:43:59 GMT

Lets Boil Down Attribution Reporting

I’ll be honest with you all: Attribution reporting used to stress me out😥

And that wasn’t great news for my customers, since often times they would have questions regarding attribution reporting and best practices. Whenever these came up, I felt out of my element. Because of this uncomfortable feeling, I decided to tap into this topic, get outside of my comfort zone and try to figure out why attribution reporting seemed so intimidating- to me, and many others. Turns out, it doesn’t have to be.

The trick with attribution reporting, and where I believe people get hung up, is there are many different options and ways you can build an attribution report. From choosing the model, filters, interaction sources, assets, etc it can quickly become an overwhelming process.

It comes down to this: What is the question that you are trying to answer?

Without having this clearly defined first, building an attribution report is somewhat futile, because you are just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.

1️⃣ My first recommendation is: Get very clear about what you are trying to figure out.

You can even take it out of the context of HubSpot for a moment. Are you trying to understand which marketing efforts result in the most revenue? Or, are you trying to understand which marketing efforts are creating the most qualified leads for your business? From there, get even more pinpointed. More specific=the better. Examples: What are my most viewed pages before a lead converts to a customer? Out of all my completed marketing campaigns, which one has generated the most contacts in our database that we can now nurture/ follow up with?

2️⃣ This will help you understand what type of attribution report you should build: contact create, deal create or revenue.

Remember, you can create multiple attribution reports if you have multiple questions! Hint: Putting these attribution reports all one holistic attribution dashboard would be the cherry on top.

Remember, for contact create attribution reporting the key conversion types are as follows:

First interaction: the contact's first interaction recorded in HubSpot. This is usually their first visit to your website.
Last interaction: the contact's last interaction before they were converted to a contact in HubSpot.

For deal create and revenue attribution reports, the key conversion points are:

First interaction: the customer's first interaction recorded in HubSpot. This is usually their first visit to your website.
Lead creation: the customer's last interaction before they were converted to a contact in HubSpot.
Deal creation: the customer's last interaction before a deal was associated to them.
Closed-won: the customer's last interaction before the deal associated to them moved to a closed-won stage.

Hint on interaction types: The interaction types included in attribution reporting will depend on which interaction types are enabled in your account settings. Most interaction types are turned on by default, but some will need to be turned on manually.

The source of the above graphics come from this amazing blog post by Davis Mastin. Davis goes into far more detail about how to use attribution reports to better understand the pay off your marketing efforts are having on the bottom line. As we can see in the above, you will want to use a contact create attribution report to understand what happened to create new leads. You want to use a revenue attribution report to understand what marketing efforts drove the most revenue.

Let's say that you indeed are trying to figure out- out of all my marketing efforts, which one has drove the most revenue for the business?

3️⃣ Understanding what "Multi-Touch Revenue Attribution" Even Is

Now, what does it mean when you here "multi touch revenue attribution?" The concept here is giving marketers credit for the work they are doing to drive revenue. Marketing doesn't publish all of these landing pages, forms, emails, webinars etc just for fun, right? Although it can be fun to create all of these beautiful assets, Marketing is ultimately trying to drive qualified leads for the sales team to work, so that they these folks can eventually convert to customers. Multi touch revenue attribution helps us say; Great job Marketing! That campaign you ran a month ago actually had a big impact on revenue- we can understand from this attribution report, that that campaign helped us close $20,000 in net new revenue! Since we are looking at more than one interaction, that is why we call it Multi-touch revenue attribution.

Revenue is not just applied to one interaction the contact has in the journey, but rather, several interactions by applying what is called attribution models. This actually makes sense because let's think about a real world situation. You google "Natural face cream" on Monday evening. An ad pops up for a reasonably priced face cream that appears to have good reviews. It catches your eye and you click on the Ad. You take a look at the product, sign up to get 15% off your first purchase, but then go back to your search results and do some more digging. You sign off and don't purchase anything. The next day, you open up Apple Mail on your phone to find a new marketing email from the skincare company that has more information about the formulation and benefits the product has for skin. This intrigues you and you decide to click on the CTA in the marketing email which takes you to a landing page. You decide to fill in the landing page, which gets you another 10 percent off. From there, you are ready to make the purchase. You buy the skincare product and another recommended product as a bundle, applying two discount codes. On Friday, you recieve your new product and post a glowing review!

What we can discern from this made up story? Well, there were multiple interactions that made up the customer journey. Should we give all of the credit to that initial Ad that attracted the customer? Or, should we give credit to that gorgeous landing page that convinced the person to buy in that moment? Or- should we give credit to all of the interactions equally because they are all important?

Like so many things in life- it depends!

4️⃣ The next natural question becomes, Which attribution model should I use? Which one is best?

This crucial element is where I see a lot of people get stuck. And here's the secret: There is no winning attribution model. It all depends on your question! (going back to why Step 1 is so important).

First, why do we even have different attribution models in the first place? Well, a report can definitely show you all of the interactions someone has on the journey to becoming a customer. But that doesn’t paint the whole picture, because not everything should be treated equally. Enter: An attribution model. An attribution model lets you apply different credit to each interaction. Like Davis says in the blog post, we often get asked well- what attribution reporting model should we use? Again, the answer depends on your goals, sales process, and the end results you are trying to get at.

Below are the main attribution models and the purpose of them.

First Interaction: This model attributes 100% of the contact credits to the contact's first interaction in the conversion path. Choose this model if you want to understand how people first discover your company.

Last interaction: This model attributes 100% of the contact credits to the contact's last interaction in the conversion path. Choose this model if you want to understand the value of actions taken at the bottom of the funnel.

W Model: This model attributes 30% of the contact credits to the first interaction, 30% to the interaction that created the contact, and 30% to the last interaction that created the deal. It then attributes the remaining 10% evenly across all interactions between first and last. Think of this model as a health indicator for how well sales and marketing work together. Choose this model if your pipeline moves quickly from lead created or deal created to customer. This model is not ideal for measuring sales or bottom of the funnel interactions, because they receive no credit.

U model: This model attributes 40% of the contact credits to the first interaction and lead conversion interactions each. It then attributes the remaining 20% evenly across all other interactions. Choose this model if you need to generate qualified prospects at the top of your funnel. You want to build an audience to further nurture and qualify later. This model is not ideal for middle or bottom of funnel marketers, as it ignores the interactions a contact took after becoming created.

Full path: This model is available only in revenue attribution reports. This model attributes 22.5% of the deal revenue credits to first interaction, lead creation, deal creation, and last interaction each. It then attributes the remaining 10% of the deal revenue credits to all other interactions equally (i.e., middle interactions). This model is best if you have a long, complex marketing and sales process. Not a good fit for B2C business.

Time Decay Model: This model gives more credit to the most recent interactions. The credit for interactions decays the longer it takes for a deal to close.

Linear: Credit is split evenly across all interactions your customers have with your brand. Choose this model to understand which content or interactions are creating the most value for our business. This model is not ideal for identifying which marketing assets and sales engagements are successfully moving leads through the entire pipeline.

The source of the above information is this Knowledge Base. I recommend bookmarking it.

5️⃣ Okay, I have a better understanding now. How can I get started?

Awesome! Sounds like you are ready to build an attribution report. To do this in HubSpot, navigate to Reports->Reports. Create a custom report and select Attribution. Choose a type of attribution to report on. From there, you can use a sample report based on your question (I find these incredibly helpful for beginners) or build from scratch if you already have experience. From the configure tab, you can filter out the data as needed including deal pipelines, content types being displayed and more. You can also filter out the interaction source which can be incredibly helpful Oftentimes to get rid of things like “Import” or “Integration” basically stuff that is done offline not by the lead/contact. Please keep in mind that revenue attribution reporting is only available for Marketing Hub Enterprise customers.

Hint: Use this compare models feature to preview how each one will look depending on the attribution you pick.

Take it from me; learning how to build attribution reports, particularly multi-touch revenue attribution reports, comes with time and practice. I hope these tips give you a starting point and important factors to think about. Remember, there are usually multiple ways to answer your question so - get into the tool, experiment, ask questions, ask for feedback and hopefully have some fun along the way! 😀

Resources:

Re: Let's Boil Down Attribution Reporting

JHeidrick5 — Sat, 03 Dec 2022 18:59:27 GMT

This post was incredibly helpful, I have a much better understanding of Attribution Reporting now. This is a very powerful tool from Hubspot.

Thanks!

Re: Let's Boil Down Attribution Reporting

ChrisoKlepke — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 11:58:54 GMT

Thank you, @katie_cort for this in depth post! Read it 📖 liked it 👍 and bookmarked it! 📑

Most of the reports that we see in our daily work with our clients are very one dimensional. Answering the question of "How many leads were created through which channel?" is super simple to understand, but in a world where customer journeys are so unique to the individual experience, it doesn't answer a lot, let alone give you actionable insights.

But I get it... attribution is a tricky topic to understand and hard to execute if the data doesn't support it. With this post, however, I now have an additional resource to educate on attribution and how to get started.

Cheers,

Chriso

Re: Let's Boil Down Attribution Reporting

katie_cort — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 18:46:54 GMT

Thank you so much @ChrisoKlepke , thrilled you liked it 🙂 Thank you for sharing that feedback-- often times it is just a simple question and a simple report that is required. But it's great to know there are so many different options with attribution reporting to help paint the whole picture 😁

Re: Let's Boil Down Attribution Reporting

Aakar — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 11:41:01 GMT

Thank you @katie_cort -- This is super helpful.

The questions that appear after we chose "Attribution" in the HubSpot reporting tool have helped me a lot to navigate through it.

Re: Let's Boil Down Attribution Reporting

katie_cort — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 15:35:48 GMT

Glad you found it helpful @Aakar ! I agree, the recommended questions can really help people figure out what report is best 🙂

Re: Let's Boil Down Attribution Reporting

Georgie13 — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 22:56:05 GMT

Thanks for the post.

We are just starting to use the HubSpot attribution reporting but have hit a hurdle. Our company wants to see what marketing has attributed to open deal amount, close won amount and closed lost amount.

Showing number of open deals then Revenue of closed deal is two different measurements. This makes it ver difficult to show a consitant story. Also with longer sales cycles closed revenue attribution can be activities that happened 6 months to a year ago.

Re: Let's Boil Down Attribution Reporting

auto-mate — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 12:15:07 GMT

Great article... but... please enable full path contact attribution. In a long sales cycle B2B environment - where we not use Hubspot for revenu tracking - all I want is lifecycle contact attribution - being limited to attribution up to contact creation is crippling.

Please enable full path contact attribution - all the building blocks are there in the reporting tools... surely it's an easy one?

Re: Let's Boil Down Attribution Reporting

donrua — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 21:45:56 GMT

We really want to use Attribution Reporting to get a better sense of where to invest marketing dollars. However, I haven't seen a way to include trade show touches. These are key parts of our sales and marketing, and a big marketing expense to attend many trade shows per year. But they are critical opportunities to meet prospects and get business started.
But I haven't seen a good way to view the impact of them in HS revenue attribution reporting. We want to see the impact of events, compared to web visits, emails, all the channels, but there doesnt' seem to be tools to track the specific aspects of event attendance. How are other handling attribution reporting to show how discreet offline events compare with all the digital touchpoints? They all need to be tracked and evaluated as part of one journey, to find out which has the key impact.

Re: Let's Boil Down Attribution Reporting

PamCotton — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 22:18:09 GMT

Hey @donrua, thank you for sharing your thoughts with our Community!

Utilize custom events within HubSpot to track offline interactions, such as trade show attendance or booth visits. You can create custom properties to capture relevant information about attendees and their engagement with your brand during these events. Also, please ensure that your CRM system is integrated with HubSpot. This allows you to link leads and contacts generated from offline events with their corresponding interactions and conversions, providing a holistic view of the customer journey.

I hope this information helps,

Pam

Re: Let's Boil Down Attribution Reporting

ESwanson — Sat, 04 May 2024 19:11:59 GMT

Thank you for this post. It was very insightful 🙂

Re: Let's Boil Down Attribution Reporting

ESwanson — Sat, 04 May 2024 19:36:24 GMT

@donrua You can also use qr codes for this! This free qr code generator spins up a QR code, allowing you to track interactions and sync with your CRM.

The contact can scan the code from your phone, or you can print the QR code to put on any of your materials. This solution can also work several across CRM systems.

This blog linked below goes into more detail!
How to Upgrade Your Marketing with QR Codes at Trade Shows