Build reporting in from the start, because you cannot bolt attribution on later
Build reporting in from the start, because you cannot bolt attribution on later
The cruellest discovery in a marketing hub is made six months in: you want to know which channel actually drives revenue, and you cannot, because the tracking was never configured to answer that question. Attribution is not a report you run; it is a data discipline you set up before the first campaign, and retrofitting it means living with a blind spot until enough clean new data accumulates.
Decide what you are measuring before you configure how. A marketing hub can report on a thousand vanity metrics, and most of them are noise. The numbers that matter trace a path: traffic to lead, lead to MQL, MQL to opportunity, opportunity to closed revenue, by source. Configure tracking so each of those conversions is captured against the original source, and you can finally answer the only question your funnel exists to answer, which channel turns into money.
Get your source tracking clean and consistent. Define a UTM convention and enforce it, because "facebook", "Facebook", "fb" and "paid-social" as four different sources is how attribution dies. Capture the original source on the contact at first touch and preserve it, so a lead who first found you through a blog post and later converted off an email gets credited honestly across the journey rather than all glory going to the last click.
Connect the marketing hub's reporting to the CRM's revenue data, because marketing metrics that stop at "lead" are half a story. The configuration that ties a closed deal back to the campaign that sourced it is what turns marketing from a cost centre that reports opens into a function that reports pipeline and revenue. That link is the single most valuable thing you will configure, and it has to be wired from the start.
Build a small set of dashboards your team actually looks at, not a sprawling library nobody opens. One funnel view, one channel view, one this-month-versus-target view. A report is only useful if it changes a decision, so configure the few that drive your weekly choices and ignore the rest.
INTERVIEW EWOUD: What is the reporting view you set up first for every client, and what is a moment where clean attribution changed where a client spent their budget?