"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" (Peter Drucker). At YouLead we advocate this principle, and strongly believe that only by monitoring the results of marketing tactics, can these be optimized and improved in the future.
However, many marketers (and particularly digital marketers) still find it difficult to do this measurement and to identify which campaigns, channels, tactics and content have an impact on lead generation and customer conversion.

In a new era where the diversity of channels and customer touchpoints is increasing, marketers are faced with this new challenge. Since consumer interaction with a given brand is anything but linear and does not boil down to just one channel between the first interaction and the actual purchase, the need to identify the channels that generate greater engagement (and, at the end of the day, greater value) is increasingly pressing.

With HubSpot, an integrated CRM platform, you can consolidate all this information and have visibility into what the preponderance of each touchpoint is in customer conversion. How can this be done? Through attribution reports.

1. What are attribution reports?

Attribution reports display all relevant user interactions with a specific company's touchpoints. They use predefined templates that help you understand which channels, pages and/or content generate the best results.  

These reports facilitate the entire reporting process, allowing marketers to measure the various data from different channels in an integrated way in a single platform.

2. What are HubSpot's attribution report models? 

Multi-touch attribution reports measure the value of all key interactions a contact has had along their buyer's journey. They allow you to identify the marketing and sales effort that led, for example, to a conversion.

HubSpot allows you to measure two types of multi-touch report: contact create attribution report and revenue attribution report.

As the names suggest, they allow you to measure data related to contact properties and revenue properties.

• Contact create attribution reports: they measure the journey of the contacts in CRM up to the moment they were created and include models such as: first interaction, last interaction, linear, U-shaped and time-decay.
  
  
• Revenue attribution reports: measure the journey to the moment they become customers and include models such as: first interaction, last interaction, linear, U-shaped, W-shaped, full journey and degradation time.

3. What are HubSpot's contact attribution report models?

As talked about earlier, contact create attribution reports are used to monitor marketing efforts that lead to new contact creation. For example, in HubSpot, you can evaluate your marketing campaigns and understand which one is performing the best in creating new contacts.

The attribution models divide contact credits into distinct interactions:

• First interaction: attributes 100% of the contact credits to the first interaction of the contact in the conversion path; 
• Last interaction: attributes 100% of the contact credits to the last interaction of the contact 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 to the lead conversion interactions. It also assigns the remaining 20% of the contact credits to all other interactions;
• Time-decay: attributes more strongly the contact credits to the most recent interactions. Credits are distributed using a 7-day window. In other words, an interaction 8 days before a conversion receives half as much credit as an interaction made 1 day before the same conversion.
  
  

4. What are HubSpot's revenue attribution report models?

Revenue attribution reports, on the other hand, relate revenues, in the form of credits, to customer interactions. Attribution models divide contact credits into distinct interactions:

• First interaction: attributes 100% of the credits to the first interaction that led to the closing of a deal;

• Last interaction: attributes 100% of the credits to the last interaction that led to the closing of a deal; 

• Linear: analyses all the interactions that led to the closing of a deal. It equates the credits of each interaction;

• U-shaped: attributes 40% of the credits to the first interaction and lead conversion interactions. The remaining 20% is distributed uniformly across all other interactions;

• W-shaped: attributes 30% credit to the first interaction, 30% to the interaction that generated the lead and 30% to the last interaction that generated the deal. The remaining 10% is distributed uniformly across all interactions between the first interaction and the creation of the deal;

• Full-path: attributes 22.5% credit to the first interaction, 22.5% to the interaction that created the contact, 22.5% to the last interaction that created the deal and 22.5% to the interaction that closed the deal. The remaining 10% is distributed uniformly across all other interactions;

• Time-decay: attributes contact credits more strongly to the most recent interactions. Credits are distributed using a 7-day window. In other words, an interaction 8 days before a conversion receives half as much credit as an interaction made 1 day before the same conversion.

5. What types of interactions are monitored on HubSpot?

• Page view: allows you to see the pages that a contact has viewed (whether they are HubSpot-hosted pages or external pages with HubSpot's tracking code);
• Form submission: contact completed a form tracked by HubSpot;
• Clicks on CTAs: contact clicked on a particular CTA from HubSpot;
• Social post click: contact clicked on a social media post published through HubSpot;
• Marketing email click: contact clicked on a marketing email sent through HubSpot;
• Sales email reply: contact replied to a one-to-one email tracked and sent through HubSpot;
• Meeting: contact had a meeting with a HubSpot user;
• Call: contact had a call with a HubSpot user;
• Contact creation: contact was created in HubSpot (includes import and manual creation);
• Conversations: contact had a conversation with a HubSpot user;
• Ad click: the contact clicked on an ad tracked by HubSpot.

To access this HubSpot feature you need to have the HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise license. If your license is already Marketing Enterprise start creating your attribution reports now and see how easy it is to measure the credit of your different touchpoints for contact creation and closing deals.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us, we will be happy to help you!

Content originally published in november 2021.