Multi-Touch Attribution in HubSpot 101

A lead never becomes a customer in one go. Visiting a website doesn’t mean that a lead is now sales-ready or is ready to become an opportunity. When a lead visits a website, the source or entry point is marked as an original source. The leads that visited your website or previously were part of a campaign may reach out to the website again through different sources or become an audience via subsequent marketing campaigns.

These sources can be social media, Google Ads, paid campaigns, events, etc. Tracking these different entry points and assigning a fair weightage to the ones that contribute to converting a lead into a sale is what multi-touch marketing attribution is all about. With multi-touch attribution, you can track different sources, medium, campaign history, etc; and tag them based on three labels – first-touch (FT), middle-touch (MT), and last-touch (LT). If you power your marketing operations through HubSpot, you have the advantage to implement a multi-touch attribution model to effectively assign credit to all relevant touchpoints in a buyer journey. Read on to know how.

Multi-Touch Attribution in HubSpot

Marketers love HubSpot for its in-built features such as GDPR Opt-in, Domain Set-up, A/B testing-enabled landing page and email performance analytics, in-built browser performance tracking, detailed email performance reports, time spent by the lead on the email, average time spent on specific landing pages, etc.

One such useful in-built feature in HubSpot is multi-touch tracking. This feature helps you track the first and most recent touches of a lead but if you set up a customized workflow, it would help you record multiple touches in addition to the first and most recent ones which, simply put, is multi-touch attribution. Let’s dive deeper into how this workflow would help you optimize your HubSpot operations.

The Relevance of First, Middle, and Last Touches

• First Touch: This is the original source that HubSpot tracks when a lead first enters your database. This field helps you understand how this lead originally found you, what its interest was, or if it has engaged enough to move further down the marketing funnel.
• Middle Touch: This attribute keeps track of all the sources/channels through which the lead has traveled. It stores information by appending all the touchpoints made by a lead to date. This information is useful for building personas and planning your nurture strategy.
• Last Touch: The last-touch data shows you the most recent source/campaign/medium on which the lead has done some activity. This can be a nurture campaign, an event, website activity, or email activity.

Things to Remember While Implementing Multi-Touch Attribution in HubSpot

• Primarily, the fields which need to be used in this set-up should have the same field-type because HubSpot would only copy the values within the same field-type.
• Enrollment criteria in workflows must be concrete so that once the leads pass through data management checks, the unwanted leads are marked as SPAM, Bounced, or Invalid so as not to be enrolled in the attribution model to ensure that the workflows are smooth. Adding Wait steps within workflows would ensure that fields have enough time to populate the values.
• Multi-touch attribution works best when UTM parameters are added in the URL or when you add UTM fields at the form level.
• Keep a list of UTM sources/campaigns/medium ready and keep it as concise as possible which would keep the reporting concrete and transparent for the sales reps to assess how leads are getting attributed and plan the outreach accordingly.
• HubSpot provides a date-stamping property on custom fields which helps in keeping a regular check on the touches that are getting recorded.
• During implementation, as an additional checkpoint or milestone, use a counter field for enabling sales reps to keep track of the number of touches that can decide the priority of the lead for them. A threshold can also be placed on the counter which would broaden the sales rep view with respect to the lead status – hot lead, warm lead, and cold lead.

Benefits of Multi-Touch Attribution in HubSpot

Here’s what you can expect to derive by implementing multi-touch attribution in HubSpot:

• With well-attributed leads, you can plan targeted nurture campaigns based on the sources through which the majority of leads have entered your database.
• With the right credit assignment to marketing touchpoints, a better sales and marketing alignment is possible as it helps both the teams to target leads based on their interest. This, in turn, would boost the lead-to-sale conversion rate.
• Historical data drives reporting in a positive direction. Therefore, using date-stamping and middle-touch data, organizations can plan more digital campaigns like webinars, podcasts, paid ads, and can leverage the most influenced channels for marketing.
• Multi-touch attribution helps marketing teams to know what type of valuable/high-level content can be sent to nurture the lead to become an opportunity.

Multi-touch attribution is the only sure-shot way to measure the true impact of the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and their contribution to the organizational pipeline. With HubSpot in your corner, there’s nothing that can stop you from it.

Want to Effectively Implement Multi-Touch Attribution in HubSpot? Talk to us!