It’s the end of the month, and you are preparing your reports of marketing and sales activities from the past month. How many website visitors became leads, what channels did they convert on, what content did they download or interact with the most, did sales open more deals than last month, and how many of them became customers?
While you can present your KPIs in a customized HubSpot Dashboard, there are some missing pieces to the puzzle.
Attribution. Attribution reports fill in the gaps of your customer journey from when a website visitor steps into your website, converts on a form, opens a deal with a sales rep, and finally becomes a customer. They are able to tell you which of your marketing and sales activities have contributed the most or the least to your business.
For a long time, marketers have longed for this feature and HubSpot took notice. If you are looking for evidence that your marketing content is bringing quality leads or that your social media campaigns are kicking butt, it is time for you to get started with these revenue attribution reports.
So let me explain. Revenue attribution gives credit to marketing and sales events that a lead takes on their journey to becoming a customer. For example, a revenue attribution report can show the last interaction the lead had before signing the deal as the main trigger for the won deal.
In this case, this is usually a big win for the sales team since they are usually the ones who make the last call. But that can leave marketing out high and dry. What about the weekly blogs, carefully drafted eBooks and on-going webinars?
Don’t worry. Multi-touch revenue attribution looks at an entire sequence of website engagements, letting you decide how you want to divide conversion and revenue credit. It provides insights on the impact of your campaigns, individual landing pages, marketing emails, website pages, and blogs that your customers have engaged with, to help optimize your marketing strategy and build better campaigns.
So you are probably wondering how revenue attribution works and what exactly can we see with it?
Well, let’s start with the first part. Multi-touch revenue attribution connects your end to end customer journey back to your closed deals in HubSpot. It works by looking at those key conversion points, also known as interactions, and attributes credit based on the attribution models.
You can apply multiple attribution models to get a good look at what activities are working and what is not as well as to get different perspectives.
HubSpot will look at your closed deals and the contacts associated with those deals. If the “Amount” property is filled and has a closed date, revenue is credited to the different interactions associated with the deal’s associated contact.
That said, it is very important for your sales to connect the relevant contacts with your deals, in order to gain full insight. Since you might not consider every interaction equal, the tool allows you to decide how to allocate the credit. Here is how they break it down:
If you’re new to attribution reports, I suggest playing around with the pre-made reports available in the Explore tab.
Let’s say you wanted to see which channel influenced the most revenue. This will give you insight into which channel impacted the business most, based on attribution models, Linear and Full path.
There are several more to get you familiar with the tool. Don’t forget to look below the graphs for the option to drill down further and see even more insights in detail.
Once you are comfortable, head over to the Configure tab to start creating your own reports and viewing them through different attribution models.
You did it! You now understand and are able to show how your marketing and sales activities are creating revenue for your business.
Your team will be excited to see this, so go and save these reports to your Marketing dashboard or as a stand-alone report for later.
Don’t forget, if you ever need some quick tips or tricks about setting up dashboards, don’t hesitate to reach out.