Deal Create Attribution: A New Way to Measure Marketing’s Impact [Part 2 of 2]

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This blog is continued from "Deal Create Attribution: A New Way to Measure Marketing's Impact [Part 1 of 2]"

Data dimensions

Data dimensions allow you to cut your attribution reports in different ways to answer different questions about your contacts’ journey toward becoming associated with a deal.

Interaction type tells you the type of interactions prospects are taking when engaging with your content. This is great for seeing how contacts associated with your deals engaged with your brand before the deal was created. Interactions — and all the accompanying data dimensions they entail — are how HubSpot tracks and assigns credits to generating deals. This is perhaps the most important dimension for understanding the journey of contacts and how they moved through their journey.

Asset type tells you the type of asset contacts are engaging with. This is great for determining which parts of your brand qualified leads engage with. This is one of the most used dimensions by HubSpot users, and for good reason: this view allows you to compare apples to oranges. This dimension allows you to determine whether your blog, email, media, ads, organic social posts, or longtail list of other assets are generating more deals.

Asset title tells you the name of the specific name of the asset your contacts engaged with. This is another popular dimension for two reasons: if you don’t have your asset filter turned on, it allows you to compare across different assets. For example, this is how you could determine if a specific email is outperforming a specific blog post. But for that reason, asset description is also the best dimension for making like-for-like comparisons. Using the view below, your attribution report would be able to show you which marketing emails are generating the most deals, according to the Linear and U-shaped model, by email name. In short, this is how you determine if Email A is outperforming Email B.

For example, this is how you This is great for identifying which specific elements of your marketing materials/content are more engaging than others. If a particular piece of content you were expecting to generate deals is not showing up in the report, measure it side-by-side against other pieces of content (e.g. Marketing emails or Blog posts.) This is a great way to determine siphon through vanity metrics and see which pieces of content are delivering where it matters most.

Interaction sources tell you where these interactions are coming from before prospects become a contact.

Campaign tells you the name of the campaign a prospect engaged with before becoming a contact. If you’re running multiple campaigns to target different audiences, this is great for identifying if certain campaigns are better at creating new contacts than others and can help you identify if a certain buyer persona is more intrigued by your brand.

Deal groups the report by the actual name of the deal. While the chart itself may not be all that exciting, the magic happens in the drilldown. Click on any deal, and you’ll see a neatly packed list of all the interactions that happened on that specific deal. Not only is this great for exploring and verifying the journey of that deal, but you can save this report to a dashboard as well. You can group the chart by various dimensions for deeper analysis.

Customizing your report to get a deeper understanding

While a high-level overview of how all your marketing efforts are generating deals is great, being able to examine your data further can unlock other important insights.

Perhaps you want to remove a particular asset type or asset title that vastly outperforms your other marketing assets so you can see other marketing efforts that can be improved. Or perhaps you only want to examine the asset types that pertain to your specific responsibilities. There are a few ways to go about this in HubSpot’s contact create attribution report.

Removing a data set from your chart

Depending on the data dimension you selected, it’s not uncommon to have one data type dwarf the report. It can make the report unreadable or unactionable.

On the left hand side of the table, you can "uncheck" the data you don’t want to appear in the report. In the example below, Landing page and integration are now hidden from the chart. When you save the report to a dashboard, these settings will be applied to the report.

Adding other data dimensions

Being able to layer additional data dimensions is a key feature to attribution reporting:

Selecting a dimension from the Choose a dimension drop-down allows you deeper insight into the first dimension. This second layer becomes a data cut in the graph view as well as a dropdown option in the table view, allowing you full insight into how your data dimensions relate to one another, as you’ll see in the examples below.

A few of our favorites:

Asset title by interaction source is great for seeing where interactions on specific assets are coming from. Asset title by asset type is a great view for double-checking what type of content you’re looking at. You may not be familiar with every asset title — this is a quick way to confirm if something is an integration, a social click, or a long forgotten blog post that is still generating deals:

Campaign by asset type shows you which types of marketing assets are most effective at creating contacts within a specific campaign:

Campaign by interaction source also shows you which sources are the most effective at driving campaign engagement that netted new contacts:

Filtering down to specific asset types

What if you want to dig deeper into one specific category? For example, which blog posts are generating more contacts? Which social media posts are generating more contacts?

The “Asset types” filter allows you to narrow to a single category or multiple categories of asset types and save this as a report to your dashboard. This filter is great for analyzing and assessing what is working within a specific marketing channel.

This powerful filter is also great if you — like many marketers — are in charge of multiple parts of your marketing operations, want to clearly show what is working, and need to delineate what type of marketing asset it was. For example, by filtering to blog post, landing page, and website page, you can clearly see which parts of your website generate the most contacts:

Many bootstrap marketers will have someone in charge of posting to social media and paid social/search. Filtering to just show ads and social posts can help you bring all of your efforts across these channels into one view:

Editing which types of interactions are included in the models

Not every asset or type of interaction may be important to your business - and that’s OK. If you want to remove an interaction or asset from your model, head to Settings > Tracking & Analytics. Go to attribution, and you’ll be able to remove or add data to your models.

For example, if you don’t want to the action of contacts being created by integrations in your model or if you want to turn off CTA clicks that are happening on your Listing Pages, you can toggle each of these off, click save, and all of your deal create attribution reports will be reprocessed. Likewise, if you have created custom behavioral events to track how contacts are engaging with your brand in ways that are unique to your website or business, you can include these on this page as well.

Attribution Models

Choose one or more attribution models to tell HubSpot how to distribute credits across the different interactions of a contact's conversion path. Keep in mind you can select more than one model as each model and their associated credits will be displayed separately in the chart.

Currently, you can choose from the following models. 

• ​First interaction​: Attributes 100% of the contact credits to the contact's first interaction in the conversion path.
• Last interaction​: Attributes 100% of the contact credits to the contact's last interaction in the conversion path.
• Linear​: Attributes the contact credits equally to each interaction in the conversion path. 
• U-shaped​: Attributes 40% of the contact credits to the first interaction and lead conversion interactions each. Assigns the remaining 20% of the contact credits to all other interactions equally.
• W-shaped: Attributes 30% of credit to the first interaction, 30% to the interaction that created the contact, and 30% to the last interaction that created the deal. Then it gives the remaining 10% evenly across all interactions between first and last.
• Time Decay: Attributes more credit to contact interactions that happened closer in time to the conversion. Credit is distributed using a 7-day half-life. This is based on the industry standard formula: y= 2^ (-x/7)​, where Y is the time-decayed value of an isolated interaction, while x is the number of days before the conversion occurred. In other words, if an interaction 8 days before a conversion gets half as much credit as an ad interaction 1 day before a conversion.