Trying to set my attribution and ROI calculation to Orders vs Deals

Smart CRM & Sales Hub Dashboards & Reporting
1

Hi,

our company’s attribution should be linked to Orders and order related data, rather than solely Deals. Has anyone been able to leverage Order as part of their attribution set-up? Is this possible to workaround? Are there improved features or changes coming for this?

Thanks!

3

Hey @MBote,

Welcome to the community! :glowing_star: :raising_hands:

Attribution reporting in HubSpot is currently Deal-based, so getting Orders to factor into that setup isn’t something that supported out of the box. There are some existing threads that touch on similar challenges that might be useful starting points:

Tagging in some folks who may be able to help here!

Hey @Crystal_Hopper, @danmoyle, @JasmineOejbro – do you have any experience with this or thoughts @MBote on any workarounds?

Thank you!!

Sam, Community Manager

4

Native HubSpot attribution reporting is still Deal-based. There is no portal switch that makes Order the revenue object inside Attribution reports. That part of Sam’s reply is the hard limit.

What teams who sell on Orders usually do instead:

  1. Keep Deals as the attribution shell. Enroll or create a Deal when the Order becomes the revenue event you care about (paid, fulfilled, or first paid invoice, pick one rule). Put Order ID, Order total, and Order create date on the Deal as properties. Attribution then has a Deal to credit while finance still trusts Order numbers.
  2. Stamp source before the Order exists. Original Source / Latest Source live on the Contact (and often get overwritten after close). Copy the campaign / UTM / ad source you want to protect onto custom Contact or Deal properties at form fill or first paid Order, and stop updating those after Closed Won / paid. That freezes “which campaign funded this” even if someone reads a blog later.
  3. Report Orders separately for ROI. Use single-object Order reports (and Commerce / Payments views if you have them) for “Orders by source” style numbers. Use Attribution reports for Deal influence. Do not expect one native report to merge both cleanly today.
  4. Workflow bridge, not spreadsheet forever. When Order is created / paid: find the related Contact + open Deal (or create a thin Deal), copy amount + source fields, associate Order↔Deal↔Contact. That is the usual “Orders in the attribution story” workaround without pretending the Attribution product changed.
  5. Agree the join rule in writing. Same email, Order↔Deal association label, or checkout token stored on the Deal. Without one join key, every Order↔Deal report will disagree with finance.

So: you cannot point Attribution at Orders OOB. You can make Deals carry Order revenue + a frozen source stamp, and keep Order reports for ops/finance. If you share whether Orders are Commerce Hub native vs an ecommerce sync, the cleanest property set is usually obvious.

VK | AXIOPRAX

5

@MBote I don’t think you’re the only one running into this. Historically, HubSpot’s marketing attribution has been deal-based as you noted, so Orders (Shopify-synced ones included) don’t count as the revenue event in campaign or email attribution the way a Closed Won deal does.

I did find something new worth checking out though. HubSpot’s revenue reporting now includes an Order attribution report. Per the docs, it’s meant to track how marketing efforts contribute to revenue, and orders are created automatically when contracts are created or changed. You can read more in HubSpot’s revenue reporting docs (search for ‘orders’). The catch is that it looks tied to the Contracts and Revenue Hub setup. I wouldn’t assume it works on Shopify-synced Orders until you’ve tested it in your own portal.

Here’s what I’d do:

  1. Check your portal first. Look under Reports > Revenue > Contracts for Order attribution. See if you have access, and whether it works on your own source Orders or only on contract-generated ones.
  2. If it doesn’t cover your Orders, use a shadow deal. Create a dedicated pipeline (something like “Order Attribution Ledger”) and trigger a workflow when the order hits your real revenue event, like Paid or Fulfilled. Don’t trigger on order creation if cancellations and refunds are common.
  3. Create one Closed Won deal per eligible order. Associate it with the same contact, company, and order. Set the amount to whatever you’ve decided counts as marketing revenue, like net sales or collected payment.
  4. Tag the deal so you can filter it out. Add a property like “Attribution record = Yes” and store the source Order ID.
  5. Keep it out of your other reports. Exclude that pipeline from forecasts, bookings, and finance dashboards. The duplicate isn’t the problem. Summing the order and its shadow deal in the same report is.

Test with a handful of real orders that have different UTM or email histories before you bulk-create anything.

It also helps to stop expecting one object to answer every question. Use the attribution deals for campaign ROI, Orders for operations and customer value, and your payment or finance system for cash and revenue recognition. Write down which report uses which source so nobody adds the same sale twice.

Hope that helps!

6

Not natively yet. Attribution reports can use contacts, deals or deal revenue, but Orders aren’t an attribution object. Two workarounds that hold up well. First, create a deal automatically whenever an order is created, through a workflow on the Order object or your commerce integration, copy the order amount onto the deal and associate the contact and company. Your deal attribution report then reflects order revenue, and a separate Ecommerce pipeline keeps those deals apart from sales deals. Second, if you’d rather not create deals, roll order totals up to the contact with a rollup property and use a contact create attribution report with first and last order value as columns. It’s not multi touch revenue, but it shows which sources bring buyers. Check whether your integration already associates orders to contacts, since the first option depends on it.