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The FAQs of Lead Attribution, HubSpot Edition

Do you know your top performing asset? Your best lead source? If attempting to answer these questions has you scratching your head, it’s time to prioritize lead attribution. Lead attribution is the process of tracking and giving credit to various touch points along your buyers journey. Armed with this data, informed marketers can make intelligent decisions around where to increase spend and how much to reinvest. This data can also help savvy marketers accurately forecast future lead generation targets and revenue projections.

If you’ve already got lead attribution in place at your organization, congratulations. However, if you don’t quite know the ROI across each of your marketing channels, don’t worry, you are not alone. In fact, 42% of marketers surveyed in HubSpot’s latest State of Inbound Report said, “Proving the ROI of our marketing activities,” was their top priority for 2018. As experts in building lead attribution models in our favorite marketing automation platforms (HubSpot, Pardot, and Marketo), we wanted to review our favorite lead attribution FAQs. Read on to learn more about creating lead attribution inside of HubSpot for your organization.

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HubSpot Lead Attribution Simplified

I know lead attribution is really important. How do I get started?

Before you can build a scalable, repeatable lead attribution process, you have to lay the foundation. In this case, it’s important to review your existing source data. Consolidate all of this information into one document and then review it to determine if your lead source buckets even make sense. Are there missing sources, duplicative sources, or too many sources? Often times we help our clients consolidate their overall lead source categories to help lay a good foundation for the building out the rest of their attribution model.

Slow down, what is a lead source category?

Lead source categories should be specific to your business. While you can leverage out of the box lead source values from platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot, these pre-set values often don’t incorporate all of the various ways someone could discover your business. In the HubSpot Sources Report for example, you will see a number of sources driving traffic and generating contacts. Looking closer at Paid Advertising, we know there are a number of paid channels that comprise this value: display advertising, content syndication, social advertising, and PPC campaigns. Try to come up with the most inclusive list of all potential lead source values and then work through that list to identify the top level buckets and the sub categories that make sense for each lead source value.

Ok, so we defined our categories, now how do we automate these values so we aren’t manually setting them?

You’ll want to create custom fields with your newly defined lead source category and detail values. Once those have been setup, you’ll want to determine just how those values can be appended to Leads and Contacts to give you the attribution data you’re looking for. At SmartAcre® we build comprehensive workflows in HubSpot to evaluate Contact properties, like first site visit, last site visit, utm parameters, and original source values, to route leads to the appropriate buckets. Not sure where to get started or how to set this up inside of HubSpot for your company? Contact us; we’d be happy to help.

I can see Lead Attribution data in HubSpot, but how do I share that information with Sales?

If you’re using an outside CRM like Salesforce, you’ll want to set up and map the newly created Lead Source fields all the way through to the Page Layouts on your Lead, Contacts, and Opportunities. Not sure how to create and map these field dependencies? Contact us and we’ll show you the way.

If you’re using HubSpot Sales, this information will be available as soon as you’ve created your new Lead Source fields.

…and then everything works perfectly, and we can go back to being a lead generation engine? Right?

Wait! We aren’t quite done yet. Now it’s time to build out automated reporting that will show you the exact ROI for each of your lead sources. While some of these like Paid Web/PPC (for example) won’t necessarily have a hard cost tied to them, it’s important to understand exactly which sources are helping your company attain revenue. This data will give you greater insight into the volume of leads, quality of leads, pipeline contribution by lead source, and so much more. Once you know the number of monthly leads generated via PPC, you can calculate your CPL, CAC, and other ROI metrics to make informed decisions about whether or not to increase or decrease your investments in this particular lead source.

At SmartAcre, we have experience building lead attribution models of varying complexity for clients of all sizes. Need more help or have additional questions we didn’t cover? Contact us to discuss HubSpot lead attribution at your organization today.

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