What is attribution?
Attribution is how companies assess the value or ROI of the channels that connect them to potential customers. The challenge is that everyone looks at attribution differently. There are many models out there: first-touch gives all credit to the channel that started the relationship, last-touch gives it to the channel that closed it, and multi-touch spreads credit across every interaction along the way. Each model produces a different answer from the same data, and none of them is objectively correct.
Setting the right expectations
Because no model is objectively correct, we recommend not spending too much time debating exactly how much credit each touch deserves. The teams that get the most out of UserGems focus on a simpler question:
Are the leads UserGems is creating turning into new pipeline and revenue?
If the answer is yes, scale what is working. If the answer is unclear, the fix is usually in the inputs and the follow-through, not the attribution model.
Email-driven attribution
Email replies are a lower-channel signal and essentially serve as exposure, similar to an ad campaign. A prospect who reads several signal-based emails and never replies, then takes a call two weeks later or books a demo through your website, was still influenced by those emails. Email reply rate alone undercounts the program's influence.
How UserGems measures attribution
For UserGems purposes, we are less concerned about where the first or last touch occurred. Instead, we measure attribution based on how the UserGems lead or contact is associated with an opportunity or account in your CRM.
Three buckets:
- Sourced. Strong indication the opportunity and its pipeline/revenue were sourced by a UserGems lead: a UserGems contact was created, contacted, and added to an opportunity as the first opportunity contact.
- Assisted. Strong indication a UserGems contact is assisting an existing opp: the contact was created, contacted, and added to an open opportunity that already had opportunity contacts associated.
- Suspected. A UserGems contact has 5+ activities logged on an account with an open opportunity, and the first of those activities occurred before the opp was created. This bucket is worth reviewing: the contact may belong on the opp but was never added.
Sourced and Assisted are conservative by design; Suspected catches contacts that influenced an opportunity but were never added to it in the CRM.
TLDR:
Attribution models will always disagree with each other; that is the nature of models. Rather than spending cycles reconciling them, keep the focus on the question that actually matters: are UserGems-created leads turning into new pipeline and revenue? Sourced, Assisted, and Suspected are designed to answer exactly that, and your CSM can walk through them with you anytime.