HubSpot Attribution Reporting: A Beginner's Guide

While there’s no such thing as a “typical” buyer’s journey, it’s not uncommon for customers to interact with your business a dozen or more times before closing a deal. In fact, today’s B2B customers complete roughly 60% of the buyer’s journey before they ever speak to sales.

For marketers, tracking these digital touchpoints and zeroing in on which ones are driving results is essential. This process is known as marketing attribution. Thankfully, HubSpot makes it easy to build attribution reports that help you identify which assets, campaigns, channels, and activities are moving the needle. Today, we’re breaking down everything you need to know about HubSpot attribution reporting so you can confidently create your first attribution report.

Types of Attribution Reports in HubSpot

HubSpot offers three main types of attribution reports: contact create, deal create, and revenue attribution. The type of report you should create depends on what you’re trying to understand and improve about your marketing.

• Contact create attribution reports help you understand which marketing activities are generating the most new contacts. This can help you enhance your lead-generation campaigns and improve your top-of-funnel content like blogs and eBooks.
• Deal create attribution reports help you understand which marketing efforts lead to the most deals. This can help you pinpoint which messaging and channels are most effective for reaching your ideal buyer.
• Revenue attribution reports show which marketing efforts result in the most revenue. This is not only helpful for measuring marketing return on investment (ROI) but also for identifying the touchpoints that are most impactful for your bottom line.

Types of Attribution Models in HubSpot

Attribution models decide how you weigh your customer touchpoints in your HubSpot attribution reports. The types of attribution models available in HubSpot include:

• First-touch attribution: Assigns 100% credit to the first interaction in a contact’s conversion path. This model is helpful for determining how new contacts discover your brand.
• Last-touch attribution: Assigns 100% credit to the last interaction in a contact’s conversion path. This model can help you understand which interactions are most effective for closing deals.
• Linear attribution: Assigns equal credit to all touchpoints in the customer’s journey. This can give you a holistic understanding of your marketing performance.
• U-shaped attribution: Gives 40% of the credit to the first and last conversion interactions and attributes the remaining 20% evenly across the rest of the customer’s path. This model is helpful if you want to increase the quality of your top-of-funnel activities.
• W-shaped attribution: Gives 30% credit to the first interaction, 30% to the interaction that created the contact, and 30% to the interaction that created the deal. The remaining 10% is attributed evenly across all other touchpoints. This is helpful if your deal-to-close rate is high and you want to optimize your activities early in the buyer’s journey.
• Time decay attribution: Gives more credit to recent interactions. Credits are distributed using a seven-day half-life. For example, an interaction eight days before a conversion gets half as much credit as an interaction one day before. This is helpful if you have a long sales cycle or use time-limited promotions and campaigns.
• Full-path attribution: This model only applies to revenue attribution reports. It attributes 22.5% of deal revenue credits to the first interaction, lead creation interaction, deal creation interaction, and last interaction. It then attributes the remaining 10% of the deal revenue credits to all other interactions equally. This is useful when you want to understand the overall effectiveness of your marketing and sales activities. 
• Custom multi-touch attribution: You can also create your own custom attribution models in HubSpot that allow you to assign weight to different conversions and touchpoints to suit your own needs. 

Creating an Attribution Report in HubSpot

Now that you have a solid understanding of the types of attribution reports and models available in HubSpot, it’s time to actually create your attribution report! To do so, navigate to Reporting > Reports > My Reports in your HubSpot portal. Then, in the top-right corner, click Create report. Select Attribution from the available options. 

From there, you can create your attribution report based on the questions available or select + Create a new report from scratch to create your own custom report. Select Next in the top-right corner and use the panel on the left to customize your chart type, attribution model, filters, and more. When you’re done customizing your report, click Save in the upper right corner to finalize your new HubSpot attribution report. At this point, you can view your report, add it to a new or existing dashboard, or export it to take your data offline.

Going From Insight To Action

Creating your first HubSpot attribution report is just the beginning. Applying the insights in your reports to optimize your marketing and sales activities is an ongoing process.

As a HubSpot Platinum Partner, WEBITMD can help you configure the reports and dashboards you need to accurately measure your marketing activities. Contact us today to set up a HubSpot audit or download our FREE Growth Stack Guide to learn more about our services.