The best attribution model: Clarity over credit

“Attribution is about clarity, not credit.”

At most companies, the credit arguments continue.

• Your marketing team says LinkedIn was the first touch.
• Your sales rep says the trade show was where they converted.
• Your CRM says something else entirely.

Ryan Gunn, founder of Attribution Academy and recent RevOps Champions guest, offers a way to make the conversation more productive.

Stop asking, "Who gets credit for this deal?"

Start asking, "What can this data tell us about how to win the next one?"

He says that chasing perfect attribution erodes trust, wastes time, and misses the point. Ultimately, attribution is a compass that helps you understand what’s working. 

Treating attribution as just a scoreboard or way to budget, creates division. When it becomes a decision-making tool, it creates alignment. 

Start Measuring Impact

Earlier in his career, Gunn was leading marketing at a company actively moving upmarket. They were pursuing bigger deals, larger companies, higher contract values. His team was still being measured on MQL volume. 

He knew that fewer, better leads would get them close to their goals. He took that approach, knowing it meant he would miss the MQL target.  

The company blew past its revenue goal and he didn't get his bonus.

"I stand by the decision to do the marketing strategies that would attract the bigger deals," he told us. "But there was definitely some tension come bonus time when I felt like I had done everything right and that just wasn't reflected in how the goals were set." 

We see this pattern regularly in HubSpot portals we audit. Marketing is measured by activities rather than impact. Website visits, email opens, form fills, and MQLs take priority over influenced revenue.

Gunn's perspective: "You need marketing and sales and customer success to be aligned under a unified goal. And I think that goal is revenue." 

That doesn't mean every marketing metric needs to tie directly to closed-won deals. It means the north star should be shared. Every team should be able to draw a clear line from their work to the number that matters most. 

Building a Realistic Attribution Model

Gunn’s advice is practical, “Build the attribution model that you have the resources to support.” 

That’s where we start with clients too. The goal isn't a system that’s perfect on paper. It's a system your team will use and maintain.  

First, understand the two models. 

Direct attribution assigns credit for revenue to a specific campaign or touchpoint. This is useful when leadership needs a clear dollar-to-campaign line. Influence attribution shows what marketing activity touched revenue along the way. This is useful for understanding what's working across the buyer journey. 

Both are valuable. However, most teams, especially early in building their attribution practice, need influence attribution more than direct attribution.  

Start with influence and native reporting. 

You don't need to assign a precise dollar amount to every touchpoint. You need to understand whether what you're doing is working and where in the funnel it's working. HubSpot's native multi-touch attribution reporting is a simple starting point for getting that signal. 

Make UTM tracking sustainable.  

UTM links are one of the most powerful (and most broken) tools for attribution. They require consistent naming conventions, centralized storage, and team-wide discipline. HubSpot Campaigns simplify this by generating UTMs and grouping every asset tied to an initiative, so campaign-level influence is measurable from the start. 

If that feels like a heavy lift, pick your top two or three channels and tag those consistently before expanding. Start capturing first-touch UTMs as persistent contact properties in HubSpot so you can track and compare performance over time.  

Use AI to capture what you can’t track.

Gunn's team uses AI call transcripts to surface how prospects heard about them across all closed deals. This unstructured data pulls channel mentions that would never show up in a UTM report. 

"You can find little mentions of events or webinars or specific pieces of content," he explained. "Because I'm so active on LinkedIn, just a lot of mentions of LinkedIn in sales calls. And you can pull that out and say, LinkedIn influenced this deal even if we don't know that it was a first touch or a last touch or anything measurable."

HubSpot Breeze AI call summaries and Assistants make it increasingly straightforward to capture and analyze this kind of unstructured data. It's not perfect attribution, but it's honest influence tracking that marketing can use to make decisions.

If you change one thing today, stop arguing about credit and start asking better questions about how to move closer to your goals. 

Want help building your attribution system in HubSpot? Let’s talk.