Aaron Beashel
If you’re like most small businesses, you’re likely using a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to manage your leads, monitor your sales pipelines, and keep deals moving forward.
But are you able to accurately track where each of these leads and customers have come from (I.e. Google Ads, Meta Ads, etc)?
If not, it’s like a big problem for your business. If you don’t know which campaigns are generating real leads and customers, then you could be wasting your precious marketing budget on campaigns and ads that simply aren’t performing.
With the right 3-part marketing attribution framework, you can finally see which channels, campaigns, and ads are pulling their weight.
Why proper marketing attribution is important
Before you can double down on what’s working in your marketing, you need to know what’s actually working. That’s where marketing attribution comes in. Without it, you’re basically throwing money at ads, hoping something sticks—and that’s not a sustainable growth strategy.
To see why attribution matters, let’s look at a quick example.
Imagine you run an IT services firm that provides outsourced IT management & support to small businesses. To promote your company, you run Google Ads centered around the different types of services you offer.
When you look in your Google Ads account, you see the following metrics:
Based on this data alone, it might seem like your IT Support campaign is doing much better than your Cloud Migration campaign. As a result, you might be inclined to invest more in that campaign.
But imagine if you could track the number of leads, customers and revenue each campaign generated. Here's what that might look like:
When you’re able to track the amount of leads, customers and revenue you get from your campaigns, you get the full story. In this case, the Cloud Migration campaign was actually performing better because:
You got more leads from the Cloud Migration campaign than the IT Support campaign (20 vs 10)
You got more customers from the Cloud Migration campaign compared to the IT Support campaign 9 vs 1).
You got more revenue from the Cloud Migration campaign than the IT Support campaign ($25,000 vs $5,000)
The 3-part attribution framework you need to be using
Alright, now that we’ve covered the why, let’s talk about the how.
If you really want to nail your marketing attribution, you’ve got to be able to answer three simple — but crucial— questions about every lead that comes your way:
How did they find your website?
What content pulled them in?
What converted them into a lead?
If you’re able to answer these three questions about each of your leads, you’ll be better equipped to know how to get more of them.
Instead of saying ‘This lead came from a website form’’ you’ll be able to say ‘this lead came from our Google Ads, landed on our product page and became a lead by completing our quote request form’.
1. How did they find your website?
Step one is to always get visibility and know exactly where your leads are actually coming from. That starts with looking inside your CRM and spotting exactly which channel, campaign, ad, keyword brought them to your site. Once you’ve got that nailed down, everything else (like optimizing, scaling, spending smarter) gets a whole lot easier.
To illustrate this, let’s use Dropbox as an example.
If I was a marketer at Dropbox and I got a lead from my Google Ads, I would want to have information like this in my CRM:
Channel = Paid search
Channel Drilldown 1 = Google
Channel Drilldown 2 = Brand campaign (or whatever campaign it was)
Channel Drilldown 3 = Dropbox (Or whatever keyword they searched for)
Or if they arrived at the site by clicking on an organic search result, I would want to have something like:
Channel = Organic search
Channel Drilldown 1 = Google
Channel Drilldown 2 = www.google.co.uk
Channel Drilldown 3 = Dropbox (or whatever keyword they searched for)
When all that data lives inside your CRM, you can really see the full picture. You’ll be able to pull reports that show how many leads came from Google Ads, how many customers came from Facebook, how much revenue your organic posts brought in—and plenty more.
2. What content pulled them in?
Have you ever wanted to know how many leads you got from those blog posts you spent hours writing? If so, you also need to capture information on what attracted the lead to your site.
The best way to do this is to capture the first page the lead landed on on your website (commonly known as the landing page). It’s a good idea to capture both the landing page (like dropbox.com/blog/best-file-sharing-tools) and the landing page's category (like /blog).
With this data, you can see which parts of your website — like your blog — generate the most leads, and even break it down by individual pages/posts.
You can also view how well certain content on your site is converting leads into customers. For example, you may discover that while your blog section is attracting a lot of visitors and plenty of leads, only a very few are actually turning into customers. With this information, you may decide not to continue blogging and instead focus your time and resources elsewhere.
3. What converted them to a lead?
Not all leads are created equal. An individual who completes the quote request or pricing request form on your website is a much more valuable lead than someone who completes a form to download an eBook.
Because of this, it’s important to track exactly what converted the visitor into a lead. At my company, we use two fields to track how a visitor converted into a lead:
Lead Source: We use this to categorize different types of forms into high-level groupings. Let’s say someone completed the Pricing Request form or the Book A Demo form, then Lead Source would be ‘Product Inquiry’. If they downloaded one of our eBooks or used one of the free tools on our website, the Lead Source would be ‘Content’.
Lead Source Detail: We use this to specify exactly what form they submitted. For instance, if the Lead Source was ‘Content’ then we’d populate this with the name of the content piece they downloaded.
By having these two different levels, we can easily generate reports that answer questions like:
How many of our leads are people enquiring about our product versus people just downloading a free piece of content?
What’s the close rate of leads that come through our product enquiry forms versus those that come through our content?
Which pieces of content are getting us the most leads?
Putting it all together
Each piece is valuable on its own, but when you connect all three parts of lead attribution, that’s when the real insight happens — you can finally see what’s truly driving your leads.
Here’s an example:
From these fields, you get the full story of how this person found you and became a lead. In this example, they searched Google for a file-sharing tool, found the blog post about the best file sharing tools, and then became a lead by requesting a demo.
Then, when we start to look at this data across multiple leads, we can start to see patterns and opportunities for growth. We might see that we’re getting lots of leads from our blog and very few from our Google Ads, so there’s likely an opportunity for us to invest heavier in blogging and scale back the Google Ads.
Why it’s important to capture all three elements of marketing attribution
In late 2021, the company I was working for lost 40% of leads out of the blue. This was a huge issue for our business, and if we couldn’t fix it, we were going to miss our already aggressive revenue targets.
We started investigating the problem by looking at the number of leads we got per month, broken down by the lead source. Our two main lead sources were website forms and the plugin we had in the Microsoft Office app store.
Looking at this, we saw that the drop had come from the website, as leads via the Office extension had remained stable.
To learn more, we looked only at website leads and then broke it down by channel:
It became clear that the drop in leads had come from organic search. All our other channels (Paid Search, Paid Social, and Direct Traffic) had remained relatively stable.
This helped us get closer to the issue, but we still needed to know more. Why had our traffic from Organic Search dropped so much?
Next, we filtered our website leads to only include those from Organic Search and broke them down by landing page group. That’s when we spotted the key insight: we’d lost a significant number of leads that used to come through our free template library — a collection of downloadable document templates.
My cuWithout this three-part marketing attribution framework in place, we wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint what went wrong or how to fix it.
How to get these three attribution elements in your CRM
Ready to put it all into practice? Here’s how to set up this three-part attribution framework in your CRM, step by step.
Step 1: Capture attribution data with each form submission
Every time someone fills out a form on your site, you should be tracking their attribution details—that’s where the data journey begins.
Tools like Attributer can help with this. When a visitor arrives on your website, Attributer looks at technical details — like UTM parameters, referring domains, and device type — and then automatically sorts the visitor into the right channel (paid search, paid social, organic search, referral, etc).
It saves that data in a cookie, and when someone fills out a form on your site, it sends the info through with their submission.
Continuing the Dropbox example from earlier, if someone landed on dropbox.com after clicking a Google Ad, Attributer would pass through the following data with the form submission:
Channel = Organic Search
Channel Drilldown 1 = Google (The search engine)
Channel Drilldown 2 = www.google.com.au (the specific domain of the search engine)
Channel Drilldown 3 = file sharing tool (the searched keyword)
Landing Page = dropbox.com/blog/best-file-sharing-tools
Landing Page Group = Blog
To capture the lead source, the best way is to add hidden fields to your forms with default values specific to each form. So if it were the Book A Demo form, you may have hidden fields such as:
Lead Source = Product Inquiry
Lead Source Detail = Demo Request
By setting your forms up this way, you’ll capture all three parts of your attribution framework in one go.
Step 2: Pass this data through to your CRM
Once you’re capturing attribution data, the next step is to send it to your CRM (or whichever tool you use to manage leads and deals). While you could just view the data with each form submission, it’s far more powerful to have it live in the same place where you track deal progress and revenue.
This way, you can connect later-stage metrics, such as deals closed and revenue generated, back to where the lead came from.
Most form builders already integrate with CRMslike Copper, or dedicated integration tools like Zapier make it super easy to send the attribution data from your chosen form tool into your CRM automatically.
Step 3: Run reports in your CRM
Now that all the data is in one place, use your CRM to build charts and dashboards that show where all your leads and customers are coming from.
Say you build a report that shows lead volume by channel — you’ll instantly see which ones are driving the most traffic.
Or you could build a report that shows how many customers you are generating from each Google Ads campaign you are running.
If you use Copper CRM, then you can build charts and dashboards like these using the Custom Report builder. Otherwise, tools like Looker Studio can connect to a variety of CRM platforms and build similar charts.
Wrap Up
If you really want to grow, you’ve got to move past vanity metrics like clicks and page views. The real insight comes from knowing which campaigns are actually driving leads, customers, and revenue.
Once you do that, everything starts to make more sense. You’ll see which campaigns are working and which ones aren’t, and that’s where the real growth starts to happen.
Tools like Copper make it easy to manage your leads and pipeline, while Attributer shows you exactly where they’re coming from. Set it up once, and you’ll wonder how you ever ran your marketing without it.
Stop guessing what’s working — start knowing.
Try Copper free for 14 days and start tracking your leads, deals, and revenue—all in one place.
Use Attributer to capture information about where each lead came from and send it to Copper CRM. Get started with a 14-day free trial today!
