What You Need to Know About HubSpot Revenue Attribution

If you put 1 Euro  into a machine and got 2 Euro back, you'd keep putting your money in that machine, right? That's the essence of why marketing and sales professionals are so keenly interested in revenue attribution. We all want to know which activities help us win and close deals the fastest and which ones bring us the highest value leads.
For those using HubSpot with Enterprise Marketing Hub licenses, you're in luck. Your CRM can help you discover which landing pages, blog posts, and marketing emails are making your campaigns financially successful.

In your HubSpot accounts, navigate to Reports > Reports, click Create Report, then select Attribution. Scroll down to Revenue, and you’ll be prompted to choose the report type you may be interested in or simply Create a new report from scratch. 

What is HubSpot Revenue Attribution?

HubSpot Revenue Attribution is essentially the reporting features that show you which interactions create contacts, deals, and, ultimately, revenue. By setting up your reports correctly and choosing the right revenue attribution model, HubSpot can help you understand how every email blast, social ad, or website click is actually turning into real money in the bank. It allows you to study interactions, interaction sources, interaction types, and times, providing you with actionable intelligence to course-correct or optimise specific processes for enhanced velocity and lead quality.

What Do HubSpot Attribution Reports Show?

Each touchpoint in your buyer's journey has a desired outcome. HubSpot's attribution reports help you understand how these touchpoints contribute to the final result, whether that's generating leads, closing deals, or something else. Here's what you can generally expect:

Channel Effectiveness

Understand which channels have the most impact (e.g., social media, organic search, paid search, email).

Campaign and Content ROI

Assess individual marketing campaigns and find out which content assets within those campaigns were influential in generating leads, conversions, and revenue.

Customer Journey

Review each touchpoint the customer interacted with before making a purchase and discover which activities influence conversion the most.

Multi Touch Attribution

For a more nuanced understanding, multi-touch attribution models show how multiple interactions contribute to a sale or conversion over a period of time rather than attributing the outcome to the last touchpoint before conversion.

First and Last Touch Attribution

These models help you identify the first and last touchpoints that contributed to a conversion, offering insights into how customers first find you and what finally convinces them to convert.

Sales Activities

If your company uses the HubSpot Sales Hub, you can track the impact of sales actions such as calls, emails, and meetings that influence deals.

If you're already applying best practices when generating HubSpot reports, Revenue Attribution reports are a game-changer for focusing on the bottom line. Unlike standard reports that track metrics like engagement or click-through rates, Revenue Attribution reports provide granular insights into how each marketing and sales activity directly contributes to revenue. This allows for more targeted resource allocation and better alignment between sales and marketing teams.

Limitations of HubSpot Attribution

Your HubSpot CRM is a powerful tool, but it has its limitations. Human error is often the most common reason why reports aren’t accurate. It’s important to upskill users and promote best practices while also having a well-integrated tech stack. Let's dive deeper into some areas where you might encounter constraints:

Data Quality

If your team inputs incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated data into HubSpot, your attribution reports won't be reliable.

Complex Customer Journeys

Multi-channel, multi-device behaviours can add layers of complexity that are hard to encapsulate fully. Since your buyer’s journey isn’t linear, you may have trouble trying to fit it into a linear revenue attribution model. 

Integration Gaps

If your business uses multiple platforms for different functions, they must be fully integrated into HubSpot to ensure your attribution report doesn't miss key data points. And remember, offline activities aren't automatically tracked, so this information needs to find its way into the CRM.

Time Lag

Not all customers make purchasing decisions within the timeframe you anticipate. If your reporting window is too short, you may not capture the full influence of earlier marketing efforts.

Resource Intensive

Attribution reporting needs to be set up, monitored, and analysed correctly to be genuinely useful. Smaller businesses or teams may need a dedicated data analyst, making it tricky to leverage the power of these reports. 

Cost

Advanced revenue attribution reporting in HubSpot is reserved for Enterprise tier subscriptions, which can be a limiting factor for smaller businesses.

Learning Curve

Although HubSpot is incredibly user-friendly, understanding and interpreting attribution data requires specialised expertise.

As we’ve already mentioned, smaller businesses without Enterprise may be on the back foot when it comes to HubSpot revenue attribution reporting, but other specialised tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Wicked Reports, and Looker can help you achieve similar insights into revenue attribution. These platforms offer a range of customisation options and models, allowing you to make informed decisions for your business without the need for an Enterprise-level CRM.

Using Revenue Attribution to Create Alignment

For marketing teams, revenue attribution reports are golden. They allow you to pinpoint the impact your campaigns and efforts make, giving you a strong position from which to claim, retain, or expand your portion of the company's budget.

For sales teams, these reports provide a deeper understanding of your customer's behaviour, helping you fine-tune your strategies and tactics to close deals more effectively.

If your business struggles to create alignment between sales and marketing, effective revenue attribution analysis is the key to helping these two departments collaborate and plan together. Accurate data enables both sales and marketing to improve their processes objectively and grow harmoniously.

Conclusion

In a data-driven world where your competitors are taking every measure to optimise their buyer journeys, analysing revenue attribution should be a top priority. Business leaders want accurate insights to understand where strategies are bringing results and where they're falling short.

At BEE, we're keen to help our clients make data-driven decisions using an iterative, practical approach that's designed to scale at any size organisation. We can improve how you engage with your audience to positively affect metrics and enhance the efforts you make to reach your revenue goals.

So, remember the old saying, "You can't argue with the data." When sales and marketing have an accurate picture of how leads are generated and turned into cash flow for the business, everyone starts to sing from the same song sheet. If you’d like some help making revenue attribution part of your regular reporting, let’s have a conversation. We can help you utilise HubSpot’s powerful reporting features and guide you on the best practices to analyse results and make impactful decisions on the back of the data your business generates. Speak to an expert at BEE today.