The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

B2B Marketing Attribution: A Practical Guide for SaaS Companies

by 

Brandon Coward

Last updated: April 11th, 2025

Most SaaS companies have marketing attribution for paid channels, but marketers often find the data doesn’t provide actionable insights for two main reasons. 

First, most marketers don’t track organic touchpoints. 

Paid media only accounts for a fraction of a prospect’s touchpoints with your brand during the buyer journey, and therefore only provides partial insight into the buyer journey.

This is particularly true for enterprise B2B SaaS companies where the buyer journey is often at least six to twelve months long.

Secondly, data alone isn’t helpful. 

To extract actionable insights and truly understand which channels are top performers, the data must be presented in a single source of truth.

In this post, we’ll show you how we build marketing attribution systems to account for organic and paid marketing channels, and present the data in a single source of truth.

The Goal of B2B Marketing Attribution

Before building a marketing attribution system, outline specific questions you want the data to answer.

This ensures the system you’re building provides actionable answers to improve your marketing strategy rather than simply collecting more data.

For example, here are a few questions you should be able to answer for SEO:

• Is our SEO work actually driving high-value conversions (not just traffic)?
• Which pages or topics contribute to the pipeline?
• How should we prioritize SEO investment relative to other channels?

You’ll also have more nuanced goals, but every B2B marketing attribution system should provide clear insights into those three questions. 

Our Step By Step Process For Building a B2B Marketing Attribution System

This is the step by step process we use to establish a marketing attribution system that provides accurate data and allows us to make more informed marketing decisions. 

1. Define The Primary Objective

In addition to answering the nuanced questions for each channel mentioned above, the primary objective is the main KPI you’re using to compare performance across all of your marketing channels.

Typically, the primary objective is either:

1.) Driving more demo or free trial signups 

2.) Improving pipeline revenue

By defining the goal up front, we know how to customize the marketing attribution system accordingly.   

2. Set Up Tracking Infrastructure

GA4 is the most common tool used to track demo signups, but it isn’t always accurate. Occasionally, submissions aren’t recorded, or they’re misattributed. 

Instead, use a CRM as it’s a more reliable way to trace demo submissions and tie them back to the original source. 

We have a separate resource on how we set up and maintain CRMs to ensure the data is accurate, as data inaccuracy is one of the primary issues with marketing attribution. 

3. Establish an Attribution Model

The attribution model defines the touchpoint that receives credit for the conversion, and here are some of the most common attribution models:

• First touch: The user’s first interaction with your brand.
• Last touch: The user’s last interaction before they convert.
• Positon-based (also called U-shaped): Conversion credit is distributed between first touch (40%), last touch (40%) and any other touchpoints that occurred in the middle (20%).
• Linear: Conversion credit is distributed equally between all touchpoints. 
• Time-decay: Conversion credit is distributed across all touchpoints, but each touchpoint receives progressively more credit as it progresses to the conversion event.

As you can see, the attribution model you select greatly impacts the insights the data will tell you. 

For example, if you only use last touch attribution, the data won’t show you critical touchpoints that occur earlier in the buyer journey. 

Alternatively, if you only use first touch attribution, you won’t know which bottom of funnel touchpoints drove the final conversion.

We use the last-touch and position based attribution models.

The position-based model allows us to identify specific touchpoints that occurred earlier in the buyer journey, and last-touch attribution shows the specific channels that were most effective at driving prospects to ultimately schedule a demo. 

4. Connect Organic Search to Leads in Salesforce

The next step is ensuring each lead is properly tagged as a lead source in the CRM so that we can track the number of leads and demo requests that originated from organic channels.

This data allows you to tie organic traffic to real pipeline metrics like MQLs, opportunities, and revenue. 

6. Build Channel-Level Dashboards

Next, we build out channel level dashboards to understand how each channel has contributed to the primary goal and answer the questions defined during the goal-setting process. 

Below is an example of a channel level dashboard we built to track demos and new users from organic efforts:

We also set up dashboards that compare performance across the entire marketing strategy, like historical pipeline and overall pipeline attribution by channel.

This data makes it clear which marketing channels deliver the highest ROI and which ones are less effective.

Get More Help With Your B2B Marketing Attribution

This is the blueprint we use to set up marketing attribution for all of our clients, though the exact implementation varies based on your current marketing strategy. 

If you want more help building a B2B marketing attribution system, reach out to our team of B2B SaaS experts today. 

We can help you with the technical implementation and ensure it delivers actionable insights that allow you to improve your marketing strategy.