Q&A with HubSpot Product Manager - Attribution Reporting

[mgriffith]

Thank you for joining us on the HubSpot Attribution Reporting Webinar. 

With multi-touch revenue attribution, you can tie your marketing and sales efforts directly to closed deal revenue, enabling you to clearly see what's working and what's not throughout the customer journey. 

We’re thrilled about this evolution of HubSpot reporting, and we want to make sure you have the information you need. We’ll be monitoring this space to answer your questions on HubSpot attribution, it’s intended use cases and how you can incorporate attribution reporting into your organization’s strategies for 2020.

Please enter your questions from the webinar below.

[MFrankJohnson]

Please let us know when the webinar recording is available. Thanks in advance.

[mgriffith]

@MFrankJohnson you can access the recording here: 

https://offers.hubspot.com/attribution-reporting-webinar

[MFrankJohnson]

Ok, Ari and Meaghan. You guys swooped in at the last minute (5-Dec) to grab the HubSpot Oscar Award for Best HubSpot Webinar of 2019 IMHO. Christopher O'Donnell's excitement at Inbound 2019 was well placed. This is some of the finest work to come out of HubSpot all year long and will immediately benefit our HubSpot Enterprise clients immensely by helping them identify which channels to deepen their investment. Thanks for that. :bow:

Comments

Ari, your overview of attribution modeling was super clear and very insightful. This is especially true for customers using HubSpot Revenue Attribution reporting, but also true for our SFDC customers who integrate with HubSpot and report in SFDC.

In addition, the following best practices especially resonated.
"Process over tech ... all day ... every day." -- Track deals (revenue and associations) consistently in HubSpot.

"Some Answers > No Answers." -- Accurate attribution reporting can be tough to achieve. Don't let perfection impeade progress. Progress is always better than perfection.

"Pick an attribution model." -- Start with the question you're trying to answer. HubSpot bakes-in 6 (six) popular attribution models (First Touch model, Last Touch, Linear, Full-Path, U-model, and W-model) PLUS numerous templates to answer specific attribution questions. That being said, we're also free to customize our revenue attribution reporting within the tool.

And Meaghan, you made the product shine. Your overview was flawless.

Seeing examples of revenue attribution reporting in response to both high-level models AND templated questions was excellent. Specifically, the 'What content influenced our highest value deals to close?" report is HUGE. A true game-changer. AND, the ability to compare/contrast between models is truely "fantastic".
[standing ovation]

Finally, some of the most valuable customer feedback we heard in the webinar was around the improvement of alignment between Marketing and Sales as a direct result of the insights gleaned from this Revenue Attribution reporting data. Better alignment drives revenue. In a word, 'excellent'. Thanks again.

[mgriffith]

We appreciate the positive review! @MFrankJohnson

[mgriffith · Accepted solution]

Thank you to everyone who submitted questions during the webinar! Our answers are below:

Who has access to multi-touch revenue attribution? 

HubSpot's multi-touch revenue attribution reporting is available to Marketing Hub Enterprise customers. 

Can we isolate the marketing team's impact on revenue from the sales team's impact on revenue? 

Yes. We recently released a new filter in your revenue attribution report builder called "interactions". This filter allows you to segment your attrbution report to "marketing only" or "sales only" interactions, giving you a clear sense of marketing driven vs. sales driven revenue. 

Can I see the impact of specific marketing campaigns in HubSpot's revenue attribution reporting? 

This is something we are actively working on. It's coming soon.

If our sales team is not running their process in the HubSpot CRM, can the marketing team still report on revenue attribution in HubSpot? 

Yes, but you'll need to ensure that deals are integrated with HubSpot. Revenue attribution requires closed deals in your pipeline, and contacts need to be associated with relevant deals. This allows HubSpot to surface customer interactions with your brand throughout the buyer's journey.

If your team is using Salesforce, our bi-directional sync makes it very easy to set this up. Details on how to set-up your Salesforce opportunity sync here.

What if multiple contacts/leads were involved throughout the process of closing the deal? What if we have a longer sales cycle? 

You are good to go. This will be fully captured using HubSpot attribution reporting, as long as the relevant contacts are all associated with the closed deal.

HubSpot will surface every interaction that ALL contacts involved in the deal had with your brand, in the order they occurred. HubSpot then assigns credit to all of those interactions, based on the attribution model you choose. We have 6 attribution models to choose from, meaning you can optomize for the part of the customer journey that matters most to your business, and clearly capture what's working & what's not. 

Will HubSpot capture my offline activity, like conferences or direct mail? 

This is not currently available in multi-touch revenue attribution, but it is something that we are actively thinking about as a product team. HubSpot recognizes how important your offline efforts are, and we are working towards giving our customers even more control over what's included (or not included) in these reports. There will be more to come on this in 2020.

How are interaction types categorized? 

Please see this knowledge doc for a deep dive on defintions. 

Is there an API available for HubSpot multi-touch revenue attribution? 

Not at this time, but this is great feedback for us. Currently, you can export all attribution model data from HubSpot and work with it in Excel, but we understand that some businesses would like more flexibility over that via an API. 

Can I change the timeframe of HubSpot attribution reports? 
Yes. You can analyze deals that closed in any time period. 

Can we use HubSpot attribution reporting to see how marketing is driving outcomes other than revenue? (e.g. Contacts/Leads influenced, MQLs influenced, SQLs influenced, Deals in pipeline influenced) 

We currently offer contact attribution in the HubSpot report builder, available to Marketing Hub Professional and Marketing Hub Enterprise. These contact attribution reports can give you insight into the key interactions that occurred that caused someone to become a contact in your CRM. 

[Rachel10]

HI! I have two questions and perhaps this needs to be taken offline to view my individual reporting page within my company...

1) is there any way to segment based on a different field (within the attribution tab?). For example we have a field called "community". One community is "corporate", the other community is "commercial" as our company sells to two different types of organizations. It would be nice to be able to run attribution reports for each of those teams?

2) How come i only see 5-10 deals total for this quarter? and 0 for the past quarter? 

[mgriffith]

Hi @Rachel10, thank you for the reply! 

1) At ths time, we don't support filtering attribution reporting by custom HubSpot properties, but we do support filtering on a number of standard deal properties, like Deal Type and Deal Pipeline. We know increased filtering capability in revenue attribution is important to our users, so it's something we will be thinking a lot about in 2020 🙂 

2) Deals are eligibile for revenue attrbution when they have contacts associated, and those contacts have had interactions with your brand over the course of their customer journey that have been taken into account in our attrbution models. Our knowledge base article goes through the content types and interactions we currently support: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/reports/create-a-multi-touch-revenue-attribution-report

My guess is that last quarter, there were no eligible deals for your company, but you can easily troubleshoot this by heading over to your deal pipeline and filtering by Closed Won deals last quarter, then checking for the criteria above. 

[Hawk-Steve]

EDIT: Sorry! Just seen the FAQ answer the offline question below..

Physical marketing is still a thing in some areas of business and stitching that into the picture is still important. For example, a holiday specialist sending out a 2020 Far East Holidays brochure on request. 

Of course, there isn't a way to track interactions with a brochure (besides a dedicated number, URL, QR code, etc). but it does still need representing in an attribution report.

Any thoughts around this?

[mgriffith]

No problem @Hawk-Steve , let me know if you have any follow-up questions on that.

[Hawk-Steve]

I wonder if the in-planning idea for inbound/outbound call handling could be involved in some way? Could certainly be handy for picking up call attribution in some fashion?

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Handle-inbound-incoming-calls-in-HubSpot/idc-p/306646...

[mgriffith]

@Hawk-Steve calls, meetings, and sales emails are currently included in attribution. We don't have plans to support outbound vs. inbound calls but it's great feedback for us to consider for the fututre - I'll share it with the team.