What Is Lead Attribution & How To Get Started
Hello and hey there, Hyrosians. What’s up, it is I, Alex Becker, CEO of Hyros, and this post is going to discuss your lead attribution and tracking, what you’re doing wrong, and how to fix it.
The truth is, you’re probably tracking and giving credit to how you acquire your leads. You’re probably thinking, “hey, I track my leads and know what’s going on with my attribution.”
But you’re wrong. And it’s not your fault. You just don’t know any better.
I was like you once. I got my lead attribution from Google Analytics and Facebook reporting and thought, “this is great. I can track these leads and scale my ads to make more money.”
And, like you, I was wrong.
As CEO of Hyros, I’ve learned how Hyros tracks my ads and my lead attribution to generate over 8 figures in sales, and I will show you everything I’ve learned doing it with Hyros.
Okay, so let’s get started.
What Is Lead Attribution?
Lead attribution is a strategy that allows you to figure out where your leads are coming from and when they convert.
Lead attribution is giving credit where credit is due. It’s like telling somebody about the best new place to eat in town. You’re one of the first people to check it out and start recommending it. So you want a little credit.
Knowing where your leads are coming from, whether organic search, PPC ads, Facebook or YouTube ads, you can better optimize your message and scale your ads to increase your ROI.
What’s more, you can track the user’s conversion path, whether it’s from your ad campaigns, the funnel they may be in, email campaigns, or whatever efforts you’re trying to track.
So if you’re running multiple Facebook ads and you get a conversion using lead attribution, you can see what ad the lead came from and decide if you want to scale that ad or not.
The problem is that most people get excited when they get a conversion and jump to the conclusion that the ad the user clicked is what made them convert.
The reality is that most customers have been getting exposure to your brand through many different touchpoints, and it isn’t the most recent ad that is what brought them to convert.
Why is that? Well, it takes people a while to convert, especially with high-ticket items.
They need to be more familiar with your brand before they make the purchase decision.
Look, if some random person came up to you on the street and said, “Hey, give me $500, and I promise you’ll get 10X, 20X, or even 30X,” you’d laugh at them. I know I would, I’d think they’re crazy. Unless they showed me some proof, it works.
Your target is no different. They don’t know you yet. So they need to see you as trustworthy and fulfilling what you promise. It takes time for them to learn to trust you.
It may take them to be in a funnel, having seen multiple ads, subscribing to your YouTube channel, and following you for a few months before believing in your product enough to decide to opt in, subscribe, or buy from you.
Tracking your leads, where they come from, and what behaviors they take is crucial to designing better ads and scaling the right ads already performing for you.
Types Of Lead Attribution
There are three main attribution models. First, your lead attribution should look at every interaction you’ve had with your target before, during, and after they convert, including any follow-ups, emails, and interactions you have with them.
The three types of attribution models are first-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch.
First-touch Attribution
First-touch attribution is a model that gives your ad credit for the first time a person clicks your ad or opts in, whatever you are tracking. Using first-touch attribution shows you how your leads came across your business and your ads, but that data is limited.
First-touch attribution shows where your lead started their journey. If you’re thinking about scaling your first-touch ad, you’ll be throwing your money away.
Your lead may have come from the first click, but what did they do along their buying journey?
What content did they consume, and what opt-ins did they sign-up for? How did they find you, and where did they come across your content?
If you only give attribution to the first click, you’ll lose sight of many behaviors that your target is showing you before they convert.
Those insights about the journey the target takes before converting are crucial in your scaling and your ad optimization efforts. If you have good data, you optimize the right messaging. With bad data, you end up scaling the wrong ads that don’t help your leads to convert, wasting your time and money.
Instead, you want to track your leads and everything they do in their purchasing journey to know what ads and content are in your pipeline to scale, giving you a better ROI for your ad buy.
Last-click Attribution
Similar to first-click attribution, last-click attribution is a model that gives credit to the last ad and last click that your target took before they converted. The benefit of last-click attribution is that you can see what call-to-actions (CTAs) and campaigns are driving those conversions.
For example, if a person came across your website from a Google search, checked all your blog posts, watched your YouTube videos, checked your social media pages, and clicked an ad to opt-in, then last-click attribution would show the lead coming from social media.
But this attribution is incorrect.
Your lead went through a ton of different touches you have out there, and if all you do is give credit to the last point of contact that created the sign-up or other types of conversion, you’re missing the big picture in what other leads may do before signing up.
Not seeing the whole picture of where your leads are coming from and what they are doing once they become aware of your brand is crucial information to analyze so that you can improve your ads and content messaging.
Multi-touch Attribution
A multi-touch model gives credit for your lead acquisition from every interaction they had with your brand. The benefit here is that you can see the lead’s behaviors before converting, and that data is a goldmine when optimizing and scaling your future ads and target audiences.
The problem is that while you get a better idea of your target’s journey, the exact CTA or other touch points that motivated them to act is harder to pinpoint.
To get better insights into the multi-touch model, you can choose the following;
- Linear model of attribution
- U-shaped model
- Time-decay
Linear model: The linear model gives credit to every touch point you had and in the order, they occurred.
U-shaped model: A U-shaped model gives the first and last touches 80% of the credit for your leads, with the remaining 20% being given to the remaining content.
The problem here is obvious.
At first touch, you may have a so-so message, but just enough that your target continues checking out your stuff.
At last-touch, you’re giving credit to the last ad that they clicked from, but it may be a YouTube video or blog post that drove them toward the last-touch, and if you don’t know how to track those correctly, you’ll make the wrong decisions in your ad buys.
Time-decay model: Time decay gives more credit to the last interactions with your target than earlier in their journey.
Again, the problem is that they need to be more familiar with your brand when they have decided to opt- in. But there may be an ad or blog that motivated them to move forward, and with time decay, you may need to see the value of some of those earlier touches.
Also, your funnel may be too long. It may take an extra step or two to get a conversion, and with time-decay giving credit to the last touches, you may miss the fact that you can eliminate a couple of touches and speed up your conversions. But you would never know that with typical tracking software and reports.
Is Lead Attribution Important?
If you’re reading this far into the post, you probably already know the answer, but it’s obvious. Yes, you want to be able to attribute where and how you acquired your leads.
You need leads if you’re looking to drive more sign-ups, opt-ins, conversions, subscriptions, and sales. And how you find your leads is crucial in your ad creation and spending. To generate more leads, you need to know which channels and ads are the most successful.
By attributing your leads and tracking them correctly, you can learn what you’re doing and whether it’s effective or not. Knowing what’s working for you will help you create better campaigns and more successful lead generation.
With the right type of data, you can scale your ads and invest more time into the types of ads that are creating those leads and conversions, earning you better ROI on your ad spend.
How To Get Started With Lead Attribution
Tracking your lead acquisition and giving the right attribution type is central to doing better with your ads.
You need the right type of software to get started on tracking your lead attribution.
Too often, people use the platform reporting of their ad source. So if you’re running ads on Google, you’re looking at Google Analytics, limiting the type of information you can get. You can see some demographic info and other data types, but it’s pretty limited.
Having incomplete or limited data will make you choose the wrong ads, scaling ones that aren’t working very well and perhaps killing ones that are doing well but just aren’t recognized as performing well.
What I like to do, and look, I’ve done this for a while now with a ton of results. I’ve taken businesses to 7 figures and 8-figures doing attribution and tracking this way, so I’ve seen it be proven.
While most attributions will focus on how the lead was acquired and where it came from, I like to track revenue. So, for example, what leads created sales calls for me and then worked backward from there?
At Hyros, we sell high-ticket items that take people a while to buy.
So it may be 4, 5, or 6 months or more from when a person comes across our services to when they schedule a sales call and demo from us. And that’s how they’ve come across our content and ads, which take a lot of effort to track.
And if I were to use Google Analytics or Facebook reports, I’d have no idea the type of journey the buyer took to get to their buying decision.
They may have come across my stuff accidentally or organically.
Maybe they’re on a retargeting campaign from some of my YouTube videos that got them to sign up.
Maybe they stumbled on this blog and have been consuming the content for a while, went to Facebook, and checked out our mastermind group.
That group has over 50 million in ad buy right there, making it an incredibly valuable resource for you to check out.
Whatever the reason they found my content, it took a while for them to click an ad or opt-in. If I track with traditional ways, I’ll get incomplete data on who the lead is and the types of content they’ve checked out.
I’m interested in tracking the entire process they took to become a lead so that I can sharpen and refine that messaging and scale those ads to increase my ROI.
Speaking of ROI, at Hyros, we can increase your ROI by 20-30%. So you need to check us out and book a call. If you don’t see ROI on your ad buy, you don’t pay anything. So you should check us out.
As you get started tracking your leads and giving credit to the ads that brought them to you, decide what metrics you want to analyze in order to determine your ad success.
For example, if you’re running a webinar and are looking for lead generation that comes from that webinar, you can analyze opt-ins for the webinar or sales afterward.
Once you decide what you’re looking at and remember people, I like to look at sales and conversions as my main metric.
Next, you want to set up tracking codes in your ads.
Finally, set up a conversion pixel on your website so that you can track when people visit and give attribution to the ads and other content that they originated from.
So that’s the traditional way to track things, and you can take that route, which adds a ton of work on your end, or you can check out a tool like Hyros that will give you detailed tracking reports that you simply can’t find anywhere else.
If you’re interested in tracking leads and getting better attribution to your ads, check out Hyros.
Hyros makes tracking your ads easier and increases your ROI by 30%. If you don’t get that type of ROI within 90 days, you don’t pay. It’s that simple.
Okay, so that’s it for this post. If you want more content like this, check out and subscribe to my YouTube channel, where I post stuff like this every day.
Or you can check out our Facebook mastermind, where we have great discussions and content from people with over $50 million in ad buys. Seriously, it’s the best group online today.
HYROS TRACKING
If you are interested in obtaining the same stats I showed in this video and even having us help you set this up, GO HERE to get more information on HYROS.
Ad Training and Tactics
While I do not sell courses, I do offer a private coaching program where I train people on the ad strategies I have used to build multiple 8 figure and 7 figures businesses. You can get more details on that HERE.
HYROS Facebook Group
It’s really simple. This group is the best media buyer Facebook group online because we make sure that every member is spending significant ad spend before joining. It’s for veteran ad buyers only and because of that the networking/information being shared is on another level. You can apply to join HERE
Here Are Our FULL Zero To Scaled Ad Courses (Free)
The Zero To SCALED Facebook Ads Course (Advanced FB Scaling)
The Zero To SCALE Youtube Ads Course (Advanced YT Scaling)
Here Are Some Other Post You Will Enjoy
Using AI + Print Tracking Is The Ultimate Scaling Edge In 2020-2021
My Top 3 Highest Converting Youtube Ads Of All Time
The Highest Converting Ad Opt In Existence