“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
This quote from John Wanamaker, an early marketing pioneer, is one of the most famous in marketing and highlights one of its biggest challenges—figuring out where your leads and sales actually come from.
With Lead Channels and the Attribution Report in Nutshell, you’ll get channel and source data for your leads automatically — no manual input needed. Plus you’ll get easy-to-use reports so you can quickly understand where your leads and sales are coming from. You’ll be able to:
Segment and filter your leads based on channel and source
Identify which digital marketing channels to focus your efforts on
Manage your sources over time
With access to these insights, you’ll be better able to understand your audience and optimize your marketing and sales efforts so you can earn more leads and close more deals.
Keep reading to learn more about your new lead attribution capabilities.
Lead attribution enables you to identify where your business’s leads come from. With lead attribution technology, you can determine which channels (such as online ads and organic search) and sources (such as specific ad campaigns and websites) drove potential customers to your business.
Why is lead attribution important?
Lead attribution gives you insight into which strategies, channels, and campaigns drive the most quality leads. Understanding which marketing strategies are performing best helps you learn more about your customers and improve your marketing to drive even more leads.
What’s new in Nutshell
Here’s a look at how these new features work.
Lead Channels
You can now easily track the channels (in addition to sources) you acquire leads through in Nutshell.
Channels are mediums that we group sources into. Organic search, paid search, and email are examples of channels.
Sources are more specific than channels and include specific campaigns and websites. A source for organic search might be Google or Bing, while for online ads, the sources might be the names of specific campaigns.
Nutshell’s new Lead Channels feature tells you exactly which channels and sources individual leads came from. You can also add or remove channels from the predetermined list, which creates a simpler and more meaningful report.
Through Nutshell Analytics, we can automatically attribute channels to your leads using a set of known utm_parameters. When there are no referrer URLs or utm parameters present, Nutshell Analytics assumes the lead came directly to the website and attributes it to the “Direct” channel.
If you’re already using Nutshell Analytics, you’ll start seeing lead channel data in your account without having to add data manually.
While we strongly recommend using Nutshell Analytics to automatically pull in channel data, you also have the option to manually add channels to leads and group sources into channels in the right sidebar on a lead’s page.
Attribution reporting
Also new in Nutshell are several reports and features that you can use to quickly and easily make sense of your lead channel data.
The attribution report, which is available to Nutshell Pro customers, gives you detailed insight into your leads and your win rate by channel.
You can access two default reports displayed in a chart view by navigating to Reports > Attribution. Here, you can see:
All leads received per channel for the date range you selected.
Won leads by channel, which identifies which of your channels is winning the most leads.
Within Reports, you can also segment your Sales, Losses, Forecast, New Leads, and Custom reports per channel, all from whatever time period you’re interested in.
To learn more about how our new lead attribution features work and how to set them up, check out our lead attribution knowledge base article or reach out to our support team.
What’s changed?
With the release of Lead Channels and the Attribution Report, a few things have changed. Here’s an overview of what looks different in Nutshell:
1. The Sources setup page
The Sources setup page is now the Channels & sources setup page and displays a list of all the sources that don’t contain a channel at the top. The new channels section at the bottom allows you to view the leads Nutshell Analytics automatically created and sorted into their corresponding channels.
As a current Nutshell customer, all of your existing sources will display in the top section as they are.
The Channels & sources page also includes two more columns:
Source type, which is automatically created and tagged with the source’s utm type, if found.
Created time, the date when the source was added to the channel.
2. The Leads list page
You can now filter and sort leads by channel on your Leads page so you can quickly and easily see just how many leads came to your website through each channel.
When you click on a lead, you’ll be able to see, add, or remove a channel or source from the dropdown in the sources section.
Be aware that if you remove a channel, the sources contained in that channel will also disappear. A popup menu will ask if you want to proceed before taking that step:
Ready to get started with Lead Channels and Attribution Report?
Ready to gain more insight into where your leads come from? Just start exploring the new reports in your Nutshell account. Or if you aren’t yet using Nutshell Analytics, now is a perfect time to get started with it.
As always, feel free to reach out to our support team with any questions, and happy Nutshelling!
Can’t wait to see what’s next? Our 2023 Spring Product Roadmap gives a sneak peek of the new features launching soon.
