As a HubSpot user, for your marketing to be cutting edge, it’s imperative that you track your various marketing assets, measure your efforts, and their contribution to your strategy overall.
There’s a name for that: attribution reporting.
Attribution reporting involves tracking your marketing elements so you can assign credit for the impact they have on your marketing outcomes, and overall, your business growth.
This involves tying your business results (like won deals or email sign-ups) to specific elements and assets your customer engaged with so you can optimize moving forward.
Attribution reporting helps you uncover which marketing elements are growing your business so you can zero in on them for better results.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to setting up attribution reporting in HubSpot so you can track your efforts better and optimize moving forward.
Attribution reporting is great for discovering how your marketing efforts are helping drive your business goals. But, how exactly does that apply to your business?
Here are three reasons why you need to build attribution reporting into the core of your inbound strategy.
Attribution reporting ties your key results to specific parts and assets in your inbound strategy. This way, you can visualize the assets inbound leads encountered on their journey through the flywheel.
In the bigger picture, this helps you narrow down the elements driving your results so you can focus more on them, refine, and get even better outcomes.
Attribution reporting can help uncover elements of your inbound strategy that are consistently performing below average.
Let’s say you run a revenue attribution report for deals closed via your inbound efforts and over 6 months, you discover a trend. A specific element, say email marketing, or blog content is contributing just 2.3% overall to your won deals.
Now, you can then decide whether your outcomes are acceptable or below par based on the effort you’re putting into that channel. If the latter’s the case, that’ll help you zero in, investigate, and eventually fix what’s holding back that part of your inbound strategy from contributing more and boosting your outcomes overall.
If you run marketing in-house for a company using HubSpot, this is for you.
Time and again, in order to get a solid budget, you’ll need to show how much your efforts contributed to prior results.
With revenue attribution reporting, you can get a snapshot of how your efforts helped drive leads, interactions, and ultimately, revenue.
This approach backs up your request for a more robust budget with solid data and keeps you a step ahead of budget crunch.
Long story short, if you’re looking to:
then you need to step up your attribution reporting to see the data behind your outcomes.
It can be a bit difficult choosing which attribution report you need and for which scenario. Between contact and revenue attribution, both trace business outcomes to marketing and sales assets but do so in different ways.
Contact attribution is designed to show which interactions with your assets led to conversions.
Revenue attribution, on the other hand, ties your revenue directly to the marketing and sales assets leads encountered on their way through the funnel.
Many HubSpot features are locked behind paywalls that only specific tiers can access. That applies in this case since only HubSpot’s Enterprise customers (Marketing Hub Enterprise, Sales Hub Enterprise, Service Hub Enterprise, CMS Hub Enterprise) can access attribution reporting.
Let’s face it. HubSpot’s Enterprise tier is expensive. If you haven’t upgraded to this level yet, here are a few tips to help you create separate reports that will give you a look at the journey your leads are taking.
Try combining different variations of the following properties in your reports.
Now, we know why you need attribution reporting in HubSpot and have a simple guide to getting started. So, what can you expect?
How does attribution reporting play out towards driving your business goals?
Here are two scenarios that mirror what you can expect.
Let’s assume you had 600 subscribers sign up to your mailing list and you want to see which assets led to these conversions.
Here’s where contact attribution comes in since you’re trying to tie these signups to a specific asset.
The contact attribution report breaks down your conversions and classifies them under the assets your contacts engaged with on their journey through the flywheel.
Let’s say you closed 64 deals over the course of 5 months, and being an ROI-savvy marketer, you want to keep replicating that. Here’s how you do it.
Once you save and add a title to your report, you’ll get an interesting result — something like this.
You’ll be able to see a chart of your total conversions for the time period you selected, divided into the various fractions that represent the interactions your leads made through the flywheel. This breaks down your revenue and traces back to each asset you selected for your attribution reporting.
So, what can we deduce from all we’ve looked through?
Your business needs attribution reporting to see whether your efforts are bringing in proportionate results.
And knowing the amount of data you have stored in HubSpot + all its capabilities, wrangling through it all can be a tad difficult if you’re not a pro. Keeping an eye on revenue? Even more so.
We can help.
Maybe you need just a helping hand to set up your revenue attribution, or a HubSpot expert to maintain it for you—we specialize in helping businesses maximize their HubSpot investment (especially now) so they can drive organic growth sustainably.
Contact us today to learn more.