How To...Measure Multi-Touch Attribution Across the Sales & Marketing Journey

Aaaaand that’s another one!

A huge thank you to everyone who joined us for our latest Sessions with scale event: Measuring Multi-Touch Attribution across the Customer Journey!

This time, we came together for an evening of networking, refreshments, and a panel discussion on one of marketing’s trickiest topics: attribution.

With so many channels and touchpoints in play, figuring out what’s actually driving conversions (and how to prove it) isn’t always straightforward. 

But alongside Joe and our expert panellist, Shachar Radin Shomrat, CMO at Buildots, we walked you through it – including which metrics really matter, how attribution shapes strategy, and what it takes to build meaningful reporting.

In other words, we unpacked where to focus your efforts, plus provided a quick checklist to get you started! 

If you missed the event or want a quick refresher, here’s a recap of the key themes:

Multi-touch attribution sounds great in theory. But what’s “enough” for a startup?

There are loads of different ways to approach attribution. For example, while MMM (Marketing Mix Modelling) looks at impact at a broader level, MTA (Multi-Touch Attribution) focuses on individual touchpoints across the marketing and sales journey. 

And if the title didn’t give it away, the session was all about multi-touch attribution and understanding how different touchpoints contribute to a conversion.

While MTA sounds great in theory, it’s a different story for startups and scaleups. You’re basically building a rocket ship in flight, so it’s difficult to implement every model or track perfectly from day dot.

But what should you be focusing on right now? And how do you set up attribution in a way that’s feasible for your team today, and evolve it over time? Let’s start with the first touch.

First touch has value…but watch out for recycled leads

A big theme from the discussion was the importance of understanding what first touch can (and can’t) tell you. 

As Shachar mentioned, if you’re operating in a narrow target market, you’ll naturally see a high number of recycled leads. In those cases, the original first touch may not stay meaningful forever.

That’s why it’s worth keeping an eye on whether older first-touch data still reflects reality, and whether you might need a ‘depreciation period’ so outdated first touches don’t skew your understanding of what’s driving engagement today.

Pay attention to both the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ behind each touch

When we talk about first touch, a big question is whether we’re talking about the ‘how’ the lead came in, or the ‘what they did’ to enter your funnel? And the answer is both – there's a ‘how’ and a ‘why’ to understanding most things in life, and it's true here too! 

The “how” is all about channel attribution – in other words, how someone arrived, whether through paid social, organic, direct, referrals and so on. HubSpot collects this automatically, and gives you helpful drill-down properties so you can see the sources in more detail. 

And as Shachar said, adding UTMs at the end of every URL can surface even more useful signals, especially when it comes to things like paid traffic – knowing exactly what campaigns the leads came from, to give you even more valuable information on ‘what’s working’ on the paid side.

We also think it’s a great idea to add UTMs to any link you hyperlink in sales communications – so you know which content pieces are actually landing with clients via sales enablement and SDR outreach.

The “what” – here we mean the action the customer took, or the action you took, that resulted in the lead entering or re-entering your CRM. 

We typically add a custom ‘Most Recent Touchpoint’ property – split into Inbound: and Outbound:–which can highlight the specific actions people take.

This gives you clearer visibility into which tactics drive engagement and where your tools are adding value, i.e: 

• Inbound: Website form - demo

• Inbound: Webinar signup

• Inbound: Ebook download

• Outbound: External Conference conversation

• Outbound: LinkedIn outreach

• Referral:  Client

• Referral: Partner

We can then start to learn which touchpoints are resulting in opportunities, and track this through the funnel to identify our highest converters. 

So that’s on first touch…let’s look at last/most recent touch:

Introducing: Most recent / last touch

Another area worth paying attention to is last touch. While first touch helps you understand how someone originally found you, last touch gives you a snapshot of the most recent action that moved them forward.

Essentially, this is a cloned version of the first touch – the latest channel, and the latest touchpoint, which dynamically changes. 

Extending this to Multi-touch

Now, if having first and last touch is enough for you, then that’s great. But we would really advise looking at having a multi-touch approach, so you can start to look at the combinations of touchpoints that ultimately convert a lead to a customer.

The likelihood that a customer takes one action with you and converts, deal done, is few and far between. Customers tend to have multiple touchpoints with you during the buyer funnel – and those touchpoints can stretch over a long period of time.

Of course, this depends on the length of your overall buyer’s journey, which usually starts long before the “sales cycle” even shows up in your CRM. 

But, there’s good news! Recording multi-touch (at its most basic level) is actually not that much of a big step. Let us explain. 

If you’re using HubSpot or Salesforce, you can push the last touch into a multi-select field on the contact. This means that when you report at the Company level, you can see the full combination of touchpoints associated with all contacts on an account, not just the first or last one in isolation.

Recording retrospective multi-touch points is doable, it’s just a bit ‘long’. In HubSpot, there’s a series of workflows that say:

“Most recent touchpoint has ever been ‘Ebook’ – then append ‘Ebook’ to the touchpoint multi-checklist”

Or

“Contact has ever filled in the contact form ‘Demo’ – then append Demo to the touchpoint multi-checklist”

Once you have a complete multi-checklist of all your touchpoints per contact, you can look at the common combinations and start to build a repeatable demand-gen machine. 

For most startups, this is totally fine and very useful since it draws insights like: 

“19% of contacts at some point interact with a webinar”

“25% of contacts have downloaded an ebook at some point”

“If a contact comes through a demo form at any point, they convert at 5% higher”

BUT, the only issue is you don’t get dates. So you don’t know what order these events occurred. 

One step further

If you need your combination of touchpoints to include the dates and channels (for example, knowing that someone downloaded an ebook between SQL timestamp and Closed Won date, and that they accessed it via paid LinkedIn), it gets a little spicy – but it is doable. 

If you’re on HubSpot Enterprise, it may be worth creating a Custom object with properties for:

• Type (i.e. Webinar, 

• Drill-down (the specific action)

• Channel (the “how” behind that action)

• Touchpoint date

• Webinar attended date

Each time a touchpoint occurs, you create a touchpoint with all this information (within the workflow). 

If you’re on Salesforce, you can achieve something similar with Campaigns – it’s just that reporting is slightly trickier. In our experience, we’ve found that getting Opportunities to play nice with Campaign Members can be a bit of a challenge. 

Not ready for this yet?! Who could blame you! 

Just know that while HubSpot doesn’t make property change history easy to access, you can pull it into a CSV with a simple Python script (or ask us!).

From there, you can mass create your Touchpoint custom objects via import whenever you’re ready to.

Add a ‘where did you hear about us?’ layer for brand signals

Brand is one of the hardest areas to attribute properly, so pairing this question with simple indicators – like brand-term search, organic traffic, or direct traffic – can give you a clearer sense of whether your brand activity is actually hitting the mark. 

It might feel old-school, but the simple “Where did you hear about us?” question can reveal things your data can’t. While it’s not an exact science, it can help you spot trends like rising word of mouth or increased brand visibility. 

The ‘dark funnel’ is hard to report on, but it is very much there! As Shachar mentioned, it is the one part of marketing that does require a certain element of ‘faith’. 

While this simple question is certainly not a replacement for MTA nor meant to be perfect, it’s simply another signal worth paying attention to—especially when you want to understand the impact of brand activity alongside your other touchpoints! 

Your attribution checklist

✅ The how

Latest Traffic Source – HupSpot collects this for you natively 

• And all its drill-down properties 

Original Traffic Source – HubSpot collects this for you natively 

• And all its drill-down properties 

✅ UTMs:

• Content

• Source

• Medium

• Campaign

• Term

TIP: If you create UTM properties and use them in your acquisition efforts, HubSpot forms work really well. Just add your UTM fields as hidden properties on all forms, then HubSpot will automatically collect them on every form fill. 

✅ The what

Touchpoint – most recent (Dropdown)

• Every time you have an inbound lead, this would update the Touchpoint – Most Recent

Touchpoint – First (Dropdown)

• When you update Touchpoint – Most Recent, you check if Touchpoint – First exists. If not, you copy Touchpoint – Most Recent across

  
  

✅ The combination of touchpoints:

Touchpoint - Multi-Touch

• Every time that you update Touchpoint – Most Recent, you append the touchpoint to this multi-checklist

✅ Where did you hear about us?

Added to forms as an optional step.

And for anything more complicated, just follow our steps above!

See you at the next one!

And that's a wrap! Thanks again to Shachar, who was AMAZING, and to everyone who attended our third With Scale Sessions event!