For HubSpot
Export closed-won deals and reconcile them against your ad and call exports, including the offline sources HubSpot never receives.
No API key Nothing to install in HubSpot No card required
The gap
HubSpot's attribution reports what HubSpot observed. Anything that reached you by phone, by referral or through a partner is invisible to it — and that is usually the half that closes.
What was sold, to whom, and for how much.
The click, the keyword, the call, and what each one cost.
The file
Three things carry the match: who, how much, and when. Anything else is optional and only changes how the report can be sliced.
The primary contact on the deal, or the associated company's contact. Email is usually the stronger key in a HubSpot book.
The closed-won amount. If you recognise revenue differently from bookings, export the figure your finance team uses.
The deal's close date. Consistent beats correct here — pick one and keep it.
New business and expansion have different economics and should not be blended into one cost per deal.
Step by step
Written for somebody with HubSpot open in the next tab. Report names vary by edition, so each step says what to look for.
Include the deal amount, the close date and the associated contact's email or phone. HubSpot's export builder handles this directly.
If deals take four months, a three-month export matches nothing and will look like the tool does not work.
The contact's email or phone is the join key. A deal export with company names and no contact detail is not matchable.
Confirm the suggested column mapping, or map by hand. Nothing is inferred without you seeing it.
Your ad platform exports, your call tracking export, and any partner or referral list. Each becomes a source file ranked on the same axis.
What comes back
Revenue by channel, the count of sales behind each figure, and an honest bucket for the ones nobody could trace. Sample figures, from the worked example on the B2B SaaS page — not from a HubSpot account.
| Channel | Share | Sales | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | 18 | $720,000 | |
| LinkedIn Ads | 21 | $930,000 | |
| Email marketing | 12 | $420,000 | |
| Direct / Unknown | 24 | $930,000 |
Unmatched sales stay in Direct / Unknown. They are never spread across the paid channels to make the total look better.
The argument
HubSpot's multi-touch attribution is genuinely useful and it works on the interactions HubSpot recorded: page views, form submissions, email engagement, tracked sessions. Where a deal's whole history sits inside HubSpot, it gives a reasonable answer.
The problem is the deals whose history does not. A prospect who heard you on a podcast and called the office; a referral from an existing customer; a lead your agency generated in an account HubSpot never sees; a conversation started at a trade show and continued by email. HubSpot can hold a source property somebody typed, but it cannot observe the interaction, so the attribution model has nothing to weight.
Reconciling a closed-won export against the source files directly is a different mechanism with a different failure mode. It does not try to weight touchpoints; it asks whether this specific person appears in this specific source list. Where they do, that is a match. Where they do not, the deal goes to an unattributed bucket that stays unattributed.
Most B2B teams have a channel they cannot price. Referrals, partner introductions, an events programme, an outbound list, a podcast sponsorship. They are usually excluded from the attribution report entirely, which makes the measurable channels look more important than they are.
Upload any of them as a source file — a CSV of names and contact details is enough — and they are ranked by closed-won revenue beside Google and LinkedIn. Being able to say what the events programme produced in revenue, next to what paid search produced, is frequently the first time that comparison has ever been made.
A HubSpot pipeline usually carries both new logos and expansion, and blending them flatters whichever channel serves existing customers. Expansion revenue is real, but it did not come from an advertisement — it came from the account team.
A pipeline or deal-type column separates them so new business can be judged on acquisition cost while expansion is credited to the original acquiring channel rather than to whatever campaign happened to be running.
Enterprise deals in HubSpot routinely run two to four quarters. Cookie-based attribution cannot survive that, and even HubSpot's own attribution depends on the contact being cookied and re-identified across the whole period.
Because the join here is on the person rather than on a session identifier, a four-quarter gap costs nothing. The contact who filled in a form in January and signed in October is one match, and the January spend is credited with the October revenue.
Running both is more useful than picking one. HubSpot's attribution distributes credit across the touches it observed; this reconciliation asks whether a closed-won contact appears in a given source list. They answer different questions and they will not agree.
The disagreements are diagnostic. A channel that HubSpot credits heavily and the reconciliation barely sees is usually a channel doing late-stage assist work on deals that started elsewhere. A channel the reconciliation ranks first and HubSpot scores low is usually one whose early touch happened off-site, before the contact was ever cookied.
Neither is wrong. But a marketing team that can explain both numbers is in a much stronger position than one defending a single figure it cannot decompose.
Fair questions
Keep it. It answers a different question, on the touchpoints HubSpot saw. This one adds the sources it never saw and produces a revenue figure that reconciles to your deal export rather than to a weighting model.
The match needs one clean-ish contact detail, an amount and a date. Messy company names and half-filled custom properties do not affect it.
Then export from Salesforce instead — there is a page for that, and the method is identical.
Closed-won deals with the associated contact's email or phone, the amount, and the close date.
No. It answers what HubSpot cannot observe — offline, referral and partner sources — and produces a figure reconciled against your deal export.
Yes. Any list of people with contact details is a source file and ranks on closed-won revenue.
Yes, with a pipeline or deal-type column.
At least twice your average sales cycle, so the deals closing now have their original enquiries in the file.
No. This is a CSV export, so there is nothing to connect and no permissions to grant.
Any of them can carry the match. Export the primary contact, or all of them if your export supports it.
Yes, with an owner column, on Growth and above.
They are reported as Direct / Unknown. Nothing is redistributed to make the attributed share look larger.
Encrypted in transit and at rest, isolated per workspace, deletable in one click, DPA available.
Yes, and we recommend it. Where the two disagree is usually the most informative output.
Yes. The only requirement is that you can export closed-won deals with a contact email or phone.
By trade
What the report looks like once the export is in, written for each one.
Other systems
Running more than one system, or comparing? The method is the same and the columns are not.
HubSpot and the other product names and logos on this page belong to their owners and are shown to identify the software a file comes from. CloseRev is not affiliated with or endorsed by them, and connects to none of them: it reads a file you export.
Start today
Nothing to install in HubSpot, no API key, and no need to have been tracking anything until now. Last year works as well as this month.
