How Mature Is Your HubSpot Attribution Reporting?

As my fellow, SmartBug Kristen Deyo mentions in her blog, “Attribution is a journey, not a destination.”

As a marketer, you’re constantly being pressured to showcase marketing attribution and tie every effort back to revenue. The executive team wants to know specifically where their budget is going and how much revenue they’re getting from each spend in marketing. 

Unfortunately, attribution is not an easy task. Even though most marketers agree that tracking attribution is important, only 25 percent of marketers are reporting how their campaigns impact their revenue. 

Tracking every step, every reaction, and every behavior from your customers is key to identifying the right efforts to use in each marketing channel. In order to do so, you need a marketing software or marketing automation platform that collects all your data and allows you to keep track of these interactions.

HubSpot, as a top marketing and sales software service, has some of the most complete attribution reporting features out there (you must be a HubSpot Marketing Professional or Enterprise to access HubSpot attribution reporting features). 

To all HubSpot users, this blog is for you. You’ll learn about your attribution maturity level and understand where you land in your attribution journey. 

HubSpot’s Attribution Readiness Maturity Model

There are two types of attribution reports in HubSpot: contact attribution and revenue attribution. You may be ready to use one type of report more than the other—or sometimes, you may not be prepared to use either.  

That’s why we have developed a HubSpot Attribution Readiness Maturity Model to help you understand how ready you are in your attribution journey. If you feel like testing your luck, take our HubSpot Attribution Reporting Readiness Assessment before learning about each stage, and see where you land in our model.

Stage 1: Crawling

If you land in the first stage of our attribution maturity model, you have the following characteristics:

• You’re just getting started with tracking online and offline marketing and sales activity.
• You likely have Google Analytics configured with out-of-the-box reports, or maybe you are using HubSpot’s tracking code to capture web performance.
• You may track the closing of a customer back to your analytics, but any sales touchpoints between there aren’t tracked or are inconsistently tracked.

Stage 2: Walking

Landing in stage two means you’re already walking. You’re almost there, all you need are a few more extra steps.

At a moderate maturity, your company has the following characteristics:

• You have installed tracking codes for all key online and offline activities.
• You have gone beyond out-of-the-box tracking to ensure touch points along the way are all captured and reported on.
• Your customer relationship management (CRM) or e-commerce solution is integrated to try to capture the full marketing and sales funnel.

However, at this stage you may not have the ability to track all aspects of the funnel. Most often, this is because humans aren’t tracking all offline activity or your sales software doesn’t easily enable it. Regardless of the specific reason, you still have not captured the full funnel, whether due to human or technological challenges.

Stage 3: Running

Run, Forrest, Run! That’s the only thing I could think of when I was writing about this last stage of the model.

Anyway, if you land on stage three, you’re running, my friend—so keep running! At this stage of maturity, your process displays the following characteristics:

• You’ve been doing this for a while, and you’re able to shift reporting when needed.
• You’ve carefully mapped all online and offline activities and consistently track them in attribution reports.
• Your sales and marketing teams are fully aligned on tracking activities and are fully committed to doing so.

Feeling curious now? Take our assessment and get your results! The great thing about the assessment is that it will not only show you your score, but you’ll see the recommended next steps to take, bringing you closer to your attribution goals and scale-up in the model.

Good luck

If you’d like to discuss your results in more detail, our experts are always available to chat. We’d love to share a more comprehensive plan for rolling out attribution reporting for you.