How to measure what marketing activities are actually driving revenue

Crash course in marketing analytics, attribution & forecasting for early & growth stage B2B startups

Sep 20, 2023

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I can nearly guarantee your early or growth-stage B2B startup doesn’t have the right marketing analytics in place to determine what’s actually working across go-to-market.

Startups either don’t know how to set up the right basic tracking and data collection or they over-engineer something way too complex for their stage. Both scenarios result in not having the right marketing data to operate efficiently. With the complexities of go-to-market motions, funnel mapping, and tooling, I understand why this is the case—but it’s definitely something you need to fix! Every marketer should know if the activities they are focusing on are actually driving revenue.

When reporting is inaccurate, not trusted, or incomplete, not only do you not know what’s working in marketing, but this scenario also causes confusion and tension across GTM teams. Attribution disagreements between marketing and sales are really commonplace—and if you’ve ever “argued” about attribution you know how frustrating it can be. Something that should be pretty objective (measuring what’s working), is actually one of the most subjective areas of marketing. And every marketing, growth, sales, and ops leader has a different recommendation on how to measure success and what tools to use. I’m here to try to make this all a little easier.

This newsletter intends to make reporting, attribution, and forecasting less scary and give you a concrete understanding of the must haves for B2B marketing analytics at early and growth stages. I probably won’t be able to settle all of the attribution debates, but I can help you get the basic foundation in place so you know what marketing efforts to stop, start, and double down on—and how to forecast for the future.

I’ll cover…

How to map your funnel, set up tooling & start tracking the right data
How to generate full-funnel reports with basic attribution based on the source
How to use reports to understand the impact of marketing activities
Why you need a bottoms-up forecast

Thanks to our (highly-curated) sponsors

We only include sponsorships from products or services when we’ve received a positive recommendation from the MKT1 community or our portfolio companies—or when we’ve used the product or service ourselves.

42 Agency - Demand Gen & RevOps

From 42 Agency: We’re a trusted growth partner for B2B SaaS companies—including startups in the MKT1 Capital portfolio. Our agency helps startups with Demand Generation & RevOps to hit aggressive pipeline targets.

Why we recommend 42 Agency: If you want to implement anything we wrote about in this newsletter, reach out to 42 Agency. In fact, they contributed to and reviewed this newsletter for me—thanks Kamil & team! They’ll be true partners and a pleasure to work with.

Sendoso

From Sendoso: Sendoso is a Sending Management Platform that optimizes your existing channel strategy with meaningful, well-timed direct mail touchpoints. Use us as a pipeline accelerator to: engage buying committees, improve demo and event attendance rates, boost email open/response rates, and amplify field marketing efforts.

Why MKT1 recommends Sendoso: We sent direct mail to MKT1 Capital LPs a few months ago and it took about 10x the amount of time it should have. Afterwards, we both actually said, "Why didn’t we just use Sendoso?”They make direct mail and managing swag/merch so much easier, it’s a no-brainer.
Another pro-tip: Don’t try to send customized matchbooks in the mail like we did.

RevenueHero

From Revenue Hero: RevenueHero is the easiest way for marketers to qualify and route leads to a sales rep’s calendar, right in your demo request flow and in email sequence. Marketers love RevenueHero’s built in routing logs, native integrations with the GTM stack, ease of branding, and insights at every step of the conversion funnel.

Why we recommend RevenueHero: When you look at conversion rates in your full-funnel reports, you’ll probably notice there’s room to optimize your demo request form. RevenueHero makes this easy. We discovered more about what they’re building at RevenueHero while doing research our last newsletter and heard all great things.

MKT1 Discount: Mention MKT1 for 15% off if your purchase through the end of September.

How to set up basic funnel tracking

I ask early and growth stage startup marketing leaders in my Building B2B Marketing Course if they can track their funnel from form fill through to revenue, and 50%+ say no.

This may seem surprising as full-funnel reporting is so essential—you can’t tell what’s working in marketing or forecast revenue effectively unless you do this. But, trust me when I say that making this happen is not obvious or easy for lots of early-stage startups. So, I’m going to walk you through it (but skip this section if you know this stuff).

Here are the steps to get from zero marketing analytics to full-funnel reporting:

Identify your funnel stages: You need to know the goal posts along the lead to customer journey. Yes, many leads won’t follow a linear path, but even if they move in loops or zig zags throughout the journey, there are still milestones. These milestones or goal posts are your funnel stages. I wrote a whole newsletter on mapping your funnel here.
Set up these stages in your CRM and marketing automation tools. Be sure all prospects pass through all funnel stages. Note: Often times prospected or outbound leads skip the “marketing qualified” stage and this creates reporting madness. Don’t set things up this way. More on this later.
Set up Google Analytics tracking on your website. And also set up Google Search Console while you’re at it.
Use a marketing automation tool, I recommend Hubspot. This will be the source of truth for marketing interactions and will 2-way sync with your CRM (whether that’s Hubspot or Salesforce or something else).
Connect your conversion forms to your marketing automation tool: The easiest way to do this is to just use Hubspot forms—so when someone fills in info it automatically gets tracked in your marketing automation tool and CRM. But if you are using something else for forms for some reason, you can feed the data into your marketing automation tool easily through integrations.
Use UTM codes and make sure that data is getting passed through your forms into your marketing automation tool. This doesn’t happen automatically with Hubspot (even though it really should), but setting this up only requires a bit of work. Having UTM code data mapped to funnel data is a huge unlock for understanding top of funnel. See the next section for more details.
Track conversion events & campaigns: Set up conversion events in Google Analytics and Campaigns in Salesforce (or your CRM) to track more activities on your website and throughout your marketing funnel.
(Optional) Augment your CRM data using lead enrichment tools. More on that in our funnel mapping newsletter.

How to pass UTMs through your forms

Adding UTM codes aka parameters to all links to your website helps you collect first-party data on how your leads got to your website and enables you to get more precise than the basic data provided to you out of the box in Google Analytics or Hubspot web analytics. We’ve all seen this, and it looks like this link Sendoso sent us to track their sponsorship of this newsletter:

https://sendoso.com/solutions/marketing-leaders/?utm_source=MKT1&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2023-09-01-PROS-3RDMEDIA-MKT1

Most marketers know to use UTMs, but many skip the next step—which is the key to basic attribution. As I mentioned, you need to make sure your UTM code data and your form data stick together. To do this, you’ll create hidden fields in your form and pass the UTM parameters through your form. Here’s how to do this is in Hubspot.

Basic full-funnel reporting

We’ve covered how to get things set up and after the data rolls in you should be able to produce reports that give you basic full-funnel analytics.

Here’s what that report might look like when exported to a spreadsheet:

A few things to note about this example report:

First, see the comments on the screenshot above. But here are some more details:

Inbound vs outbound sources

If you don’t look at inbound and outbound separately, your conversion rates will look confusing. You need to break this out and recognize that the way these leads move through the funnel is a bit different. Inbound sources should be further broken out by specific channels (you can use the standard classifications from GA or Hubspot and/or use your UTM source codes).

I’m using outbound to mean leads that were originally prospected and emailed by sales (before they came inbound), this shows up as “offline” in Hubspot. Inbound sources typically include email campaigns, organic search, paid ads (SEM, display ads, social ads), referrals from other sites, organic social, and direct traffic.

This example funnel report is by original lead source or “first touch”

The above report gives you a linear view of the lead to customer journey broken down by how a lead got to your website before they filled out an inbound form. But obviously, that’s not always how leads get to you and this report in isolation doesn’t give you all the information you need to know what’s working.

That said, early on, you don’t need a complex multi-touch attribution model to figure out what’s actually going on. In fact, that would be distracting and likely overkill at your stage. But figuring out what’s working is also not as easy as just looking at the original source of a lead (aka how they first got into your database), even if that’s the primary way you slice and dice your funnel and create reports. I recommend you also look at the last touch at the qualified stage (aka the qualifying event) and campaign influence reports, more on this below.

In addition to full-funnel reports based on first touch, last touch, and campaign influence, here are some other reports that are helpful to get a full picture of what’s going on in marketing:

Cohorted and in-month funnel reports
Full-funnel reports broken out by individual paid campaign, especially as your paid budget increases
Web activity and conversion by page

More from MKT1

✂️ Templates for paid subscribers: Paid subscribers can find all templates here including a marketing reporting and forecasting workbook I created with Recalc and shared in this newsletter. It does all the calcs for you—just plug in your assumptions and raw data.

🧑‍🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community. Paid subscribers can now add jobs to our job board for free!

📖 Keep reading: Paid subscribers get access to the rest of this newsletter which includes how to set up basic attribution, the differences between in-month and cohort data, and why you need a bottom-up forecast.