How To Set Up Hubspot Attribution Reporting for SaaS

Marketers today have a variety of channels with which they can engage their audience. Although the buyer’s journey is no longer linear, the marketers will still need to engage with their customers through multiple touchpoints before they make a purchase. 

And that’s where the challenge lies—  the marketers need to know which channels provide the biggest ROI and why that happens. They need to use predictive analytics to assess which channels are worth investing more since they provide better results and which channels should take a back seat. 

But considering the buyer’s journey not being linear, it’s getting harder and harder to track the process and distinguish between vanity metrics and those that move the needle. 

That’s where marketing attribution comes into play. 

What is Hubspot Attribution Reporting?

Marketing attribution is simply a reporting strategy. Marketing attribution allows marketing and sales people to see the impact their marketing made on an objective such as a purchase, sale, or subscription. 

You can see the impact of your goals and objectives by taking a marketing attribution report. It pulls all the relevant data and interaction points from the buyer’s journey and provides insights into which channels and content types provide the biggest return on investment. 

There’s also multi-touch attribution which measures all the customer’s interactions with a brand up to the key moment in the buyer’s journey.

When you use multi-touch attribution, you can see all the interactions the customer had and pinpoint the exact one that led to a conversion in the buyer’s journey. This will provide you with the necessary info regarding the buyer’s behavior so that you can make better time/money investments in the future. 

With this strategy, you can, for example, see how a blog post or a social media campaign impacted sales or which campaign drove the most revenue. 

When it comes to HubSpot, they support two types of multi-touch attribution reports: 

• Revenue attribution reports. These multi-touch reports measure the entire journey from the visitor/stranger phase to the point where the lead became a customer. 
• Contact create attribution reports. These multi-touch reports measure the journey of your contacts from the moment they were created in your CRM. 

HubSpot attribution reporting is based on contact interactions that HubSpot is tracking. There needs to be an associated contact or the revenue will not be attributed to any interactions. 

What is Attribution reporting and why it’s important to SaaS?

When you use attribution reporting, you will be able to tell the following things: 

• Where are your customers coming from (which channels)
• What piece of content did they engage with
• Where are they in the buyer’s journey when they’re consuming a certain piece of content
• What campaigns are effective in different stages of the buyer’s journey

There are different attribution reporting models that will help you assess the effectiveness of your channels: 

• First interaction. This report emphasizes the importance of the first interaction the customer has with your brand.

• Last interaction. This report emphasizes the importance of the last interaction that the customer had before they achieved the goal you set out for them. 

• Linear attribution. This report gives credit to all data points in your buyer’s journey evenly. 

• U-shaped. This report places 40% of the value on the first interaction and then another 40% on a set point that you created within the system. The remaining 20% focuses on the behaviors between those two points. 

• W-shaped. This report also distributes value to different points: 30% on the first interaction, 30% on the last interaction, and 30% to a specific point set in the journey. The remaining 10% is for the remaining data points. 

• Full-path. This model evenly spreads the credit to the first, last, special point, and the closed sale point (22.5% each). The remaining 10% is spread across the remaining data points. 
• Time decay. This model puts the focus on the most recent data point interactions. 

As a SaaS business, you need to be doing marketing attribution reports. Not only for the first interaction/payment the customer does, but also for the lifetime value of the customer and figuring out how to increase it. 

So using marketing attribution as Saas is essential if you want your business to thrive. 

Why is Hubspot Renowned for attribution reporting

HubSpot is an all-in-one full CRM platform and it’s no different when it comes to attribution reporting. 

Within HubSpot, you can choose one of the two multi-touch attribution reports: Contact create, and revenue attribution reports. 

With contact create attribution report, you actually cover the first interaction (first touchpoint) and lead generation in the buyer’s journey. With the revenue attribution model, you cover all the data points up till the person becomes a customer of your business. 

So with HubSpot attribution reporting, you’re covering the entirety of the buyer’s journey and no matter what your attribution report goals are, you can achieve them by using HubSpot’s attribution reporting. 

Benefits of Hubspot’s CRM for SaaS Industry

There are four main benefits that SaaS companies get by using HubSpot’s CRM: 

• Implementing buyer personas. SaaS companies work with people from various industries and they need to reach out and target different decision-makers. To do so effectively, SaaS companies are using HubSpot to develop buyer’s personas and figure out the most effective strategies to reach their personas.

• Building inbound processes. SaaS companies are using HubSpot to “build the bridge” between their sales and marketing teams— enter inbound processes. SaaS companies are working with HubSpot to create inbound processes, define steps all the way from lead generation to generating sales. 

• Content marketing & SEO. SaaS companies need to create enough content to provide information to their potential customers. On top of that, they need to be “seen” by the customers on SERP.  To do so, they’re using HubSpot’s CRM to manage their content production and content distribution.

• Automation. SaaS companies usually have quite a long sales cycle and to ensure that all the steps in the process are being executed, the company needs to rely on automation. SaaS companies are using HubSpot’s automation options for lead nurturing and making sure that no steps in the process are being skipped. 

Setting Up Attribution Reporting for SaaS Brands

We will cover four different things when it comes to attribution reporting: 

• Creating a report
• Configuring a report
• Adding report filters
• Saving/exporting the report

Creating a report

Here is the step-by-step process on how to create a report: 

1. Go to your HubSpot account and click on Reports
2. Click Create custom report
3. On the left side, select Attribution
4. You will have two options for generating reports: Sample report or Create New Report
5. On the top right, click Next, and then name your report

Configuring a report

Configuring a report will help you get the most out of your attribution reports:

1. You can configure chart type, attribution model. and dimensions.
2. Chart types have Donut, Pie, and Summary chart types
3. You can choose different attribution models (first, last, linear, W-shaped, U-shaped, full-path, time-decay)
4. You can choose different dimensions (asset, deal, interaction, UTM, and others)

Adding report filters

To set up report filters, go to: 

1. In the left sidebar, choose filters that are exclusive to one of the three attribution reports
   1. Contact create attribution reports
   2. Deal create attribution reports 
   3. Revenue attribution reports
2. You can choose asset types
3. You can choose to limit the report to only one campaign
4. You can limit the report to a specific interaction source (like organic search)

Saving/exporting the report

Here’s a step-by-step process on how to save your attribution report: 

1. Set-up your report
2. On the top right, click Save. This will give you the option to add to the dashboard, not add to the dashboard, or create a new dashboard where it will be saved
3. Name your report and save it 
4. To export your report, click Export in the upper right

SaaS Marketing Attribution 

Attribution reporting can really help you define where you need to focus your marketing efforts. But if you still need additional help with figuring out how to get sales-qualified leads instead of marketing-qualified leads, you should book an intro call with one of our agents.