A Complete Guide to HubSpot Multi-Touch Attribution

Today, customers interact with your brand via a large number of channels. In other words, they interact with multiple touchpoints in a non-linear, non-predictable way before they make a purchase. This unpredictability can make it difficult for your business to pinpoint what interactions influence purchase decisions. However, in order to avoid wasting precious resources, it’s important to determine what these touchpoints are. A tool that makes this easy to do is HubSpot multi-touch attribution.

What is Marketing Attribution?

Marketing attribution is a reporting strategy that helps sales and marketing teams see how marketing efforts impact a specific goal your business has set. These goals can include purchases or sales. Marketing attribution makes it possible to see how a blog post or social media strategy affects sales, for example.

HubSpot’s marketing attribution takes and analyzes all of the appropriate buyer’s journey interactions. Using pre-built models, marketing attribution reports put all the information together to help you determine which of your marketing efforts are impacting your marketing goals.

What is HubSpot Multi-Touch Attribution?

HubSpot’s multi-touch attribution works by measuring and assigning value to every one of a contact’s interactions up to a significant moment in the customer journey. This helps your company identify the exact marketing or sales effort that resulted in a conversion.

With HubSpot, two multi-touch attribution report types are supported: contact create attribution and revenue attribution.

Multi-Touch Revenue Attribution

Revenue attribution reports measure the journey up to the moment they became customers, giving you a better understanding of what marketing efforts bring in more revenue for your business. To be included in the revenue attribution report, the following conditions must be met:

• Deal must be in a closed-won stage
• Deal must be associated with at least one contact
• Deal must have known property values for the Amount, Create date, and Close date property

Multi-Touch Contact Create Attribution

Contact create attribution measures the journey of contacts in your CRM up to the moment they were created. The multi-touch contact creates attribution shows specifically which marketing efforts deserve credit for earning your business a new contact. With this information, your company can identify what works in regards to creating new contacts and optimize your marketing efforts in the future to gain a larger number of contacts.

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Lead Attribution

Lead attribution is another type of marketing attribution that gives data on how your marketing efforts affect the number of leads you generate per campaign. Even though leads do not directly contribute to your business’s sales or revenue, focusing on lead attribution can give valuable insights into what specific campaigns are being interacted with most. These interactions can potentially turn into sales for your company.

Marketing Attribution Models

When it comes to marketing attribution models, there are seven different attribution models that interpret the data differently, splitting the revenue credits to interactions in different ways. The seven different attribution models include:

• First Interaction Attribution Model: 100% of the deal revenue credits are attributed to the contact’s first interaction in the conversion path.
• Last Interaction Attribution Model: This model is the opposite of the first interaction attribution model. All deal revenue credits are assigned to the conversion path’s last interaction.
• Full-Path Attribution Model: 5% of the deal revenue credits are assigned to the first interaction, last interaction, lead creation, and deal creation each. The leftover 10% is equally assigned to the rest of the interactions.
• Linear Attribution Model: The linear attribution model assigns the deal revenue credits to every interaction equally.
• U-Shaped Attribution Model: With the u-shaped attribution model, 40% of the deal revenue credits are assigned to both the first interaction and lead conversion interactions. All other interactions receive the leftover 20% of deal revenue credits.
• W-Shaped Attribution Model: The w-shaped attribution model allocates 30% of deal revenue credits to the first interaction, deal creation interaction, and lead conversion interaction each. The 10% leftover deal is allocated to the rest of the interactions equally.
• Time-Decay Attribution Model: With the time-decay attribution model, the more recent interactions get more credit. The interaction’s credit decays the more time it takes for a prospect to convert into a contact.

How to Choose the Right Marketing Multi-Touch Attribution Model for Your B2B Business

The truth is, there is no one correct or incorrect multi-touch attribution model to choose for your B2B business. The model you choose depends on the strategy you want to pursue.

For example, if you want insights on how potential customers are being introduced to your brand, a first interaction attribution model is the best option to choose. If you have a longer sale cycle and wish to see the media and messaging combinations that impact conversion, a u-shaped attribution model is an effective choice.

How to Create an Attribution Report in HubSpot

To create a custom multi-touch attribution report in HubSpot, follow the steps below:

1. Access your HubSpot account and click the Reports drop-down menu. Then, click the Reports option.
2. Navigate to the upper right corner and press “Create custom report.”
3. Then, choose “Attribution.”
4. Next, click “Revenue” and then click “Next,” located in the top right corner.
5. After that, select the pencil icon to give your report a name.
6. Once you name your report, if you want more information on the different report types, navigate to the “Explore” tab.
7. Once you choose the type of report you want to create, you can begin configuring your report. Click on the Configure tab to set up chart type, deal close date, deals, deal pipeline, deal owner, deal type, campaign, company, content type, interaction, dimensions, and attribution model.

Benefits of Multi-Touch Attribution Reporting

Multi-touch attribution is very beneficial for all B2B businesses. By using multi-touch attribution, your marketing and sales team can make educated decisions on what resources to invest more in, as well as what efforts to decrease or stop completely. This will decrease costs for your company and improve productivity by allowing your company to avoid wasting valuable resources. What’s more, tracking and measuring conversions will increase ROI for each conversion.

Additionally, as customers use different channels to research your business’s products or services, digital footprints are left behind. These digital footprints make it easier for companies to reach consumers in a more impactful way through a personalized customer journey and user experience.

Need Help with HubSpot Multi-Touch Attribution?

If your company wants to save on costs and optimize their ROI, setting multi-touch attribution is a crucial factor. Interested in setting up HubSpot multi-touch attribution and want help doing so? Contact our marketing experts at OneIMS. As a Diamond Agency Partner, our team has extensive expertise using HubSpot.