Track First Touch Marketing Attribution with HubSpot Data

Marketing attribution continues to be a hot topic of conversation for marketing teams, no matter the industry or size of the organization. Attribution is a huge part of knowing which campaigns and channels are effective, ultimately informing the rest of your marketing strategies. With that, marketing teams are racing to figure out their marketing attribution model.

As marketers are beginning to leverage data and dive into the analytics of their marketing campaigns, it has become apparent that marketing attribution is still a hurdle for many of us.

While we’ve previously shared best practices around tracking marketing attribution with Google Analytics, there are many strategies to consider and implement to track attribution. For those just starting out, we suggest a first touch attribution model that leverages your already-in-place marketing automation platform such as HubSpot.

Why First Touch Attribution?

First touch is where many marketers spend a lot of their time building awareness and getting eyes on their ad campaigns. So, using a first touch attribution model makes sense as it’s often the first step into the overall marketing funnel. With creating a first touch attribution model, marketers can quickly discern which channels are high-performing and see which channels are providing the most qualified leads.

Knowing where prospects are engaging early on can help marketers do a lot of things such as:

• Quickly iterate on paid messaging campaigns
• Allocate more budget on a channel that’s yielding more leads
• Create more relevant content that engages with readers earlier in the customer journey

To say the least, first touch marketing attribution is valuable to understand. Knowing which channels and campaigns are successful will lead to more efficient marketing initiatives, reduce spend (or at least allow you to calibrate overall spend) and can help shape the strategy of future campaigns that are optimized for higher ROI.

How to Track First Touch Marketing Attribution with HubSpot Data

In the video below, we’ll walk you through how to track first touch marketing attribution with HubSpot data in Chartio.

By implementing a first touch model, you can use these insights to inform the journey throughout the rest of the funnel.

1. First, start in the contact table. We’ll want to make sure we are grabbing unique contacts. Choose ‘Email’ and drag it to Measures as the unique count of distinct emails.
2. Then, use original Source Type, the first known source through which a contact found your website. This will show up as HS Analytics Source, drag that to the dimensions sections.
3. To best segment this, I recommend choosing a time frame for when the contact was created. In this case I care about seeing all contacts who came in during the current quarter.
4. We can drill down further, using Original Source Drill-Down 2 where we can find additional information such as the channel or website the contact came from. It is found under HS_Analytics_Source_data_2.
5. I then recommend pivoting this data to make it easier to visualize.

For more insights into full-funnel marketing attribution, read how fellow data-driven marketers are connecting their disparate data sources to create more efficient campaigns.