3 Ways Your Hubspot Attribution is Lying to You and How to Fix It
Understandably, most B2B startups “set up" Hubspot by installing the tracking code, syncing with third party platforms, and trusting whatever shows up in Original Traffic Source fields when attributing their leads, pipeline, revenue, etc. back to their promotion initiatives. This will feel like it's working well--maybe even for years.
Unfortunately, if you're serious about tracking and differentiating GTM investments, Hubspot’s default setup has serious blind spots. And the longer you delay addressing these blind spots, the more distorted your data becomes, and the harder it is to unwind later.
The good news is that a focused ~10 hour investment upfront ensures that when you make major bets on channels, headcount, forecasts, or budget, you’re operating on trusted data. Importantly, this solution allows default attribution to continue in parallel with the superior method described in this article. This is an extremely high ROI investment.
Side note: Why wouldn’t Hubspot be optimized out of the box? Because Hubspot is designed to work for everyone, from solo founders to large enterprises, so it necessarily defaults to broad, generic assumptions. These defaults break down quickly (and insidiously) for startups with GTM teams and significant channel investments.
Deception #1: Understanding the Flaws in Hubspot's Default Channel Reporting for Outbound/Inbound Programs
This one is most relevant for orgs with an outbound sales motion who will inevitably import anywhere from thousands to hundreds of thousands of cold contacts from tools like Clay, ZoomInfo, or web scrapes. In this situation, Hubspot's default of auto-logging of meaningless touchpoints prevents real engagement from taking credit, significantly distorting channel reporting.
How? When these contacts are uploaded, Hubspot automatically classifies them as Offline Sources, regardless of whether any sales activity ever occurs. Because, in this case, “offline” is interpreted as outbound, you're likely attributing everything labeled Offline Sources to sales-driven activity. Early on—when your contact list is in the hundreds or thousands, and initiatives don’t overlap much—this assumption holds. But your growth will quickly outpace the ability for you to maintain meaningful reporting if this gap isn't mitigated.
As an example, imagine you’re working a total addressable market (TAM) of 10k companies with roughly 30k prospects. At first, you upload a couple thousand contacts and actively outbound to them, in parallel with other efforts. Over time, you import 50% or more of the remaining prospects into Hubspot—many of whom either aren't ever treated, don't receive your outreach, or don't notice or respond to it.
At this point, a large portion of your contact database is permanently tagged as Offline Sources simply because of how the data entered the system. As a result, more and more downstream activity appears “outbound-driven” by default, regardless of what actually happened.
Hubspot anchors those contacts to Offline Sources indefinitely. The outcome is systematic misattribution: channel-level pipeline and ROI reporting become unreliable—not because of poor execution, but as a direct consequence of Hubspot’s default behavior unless it is explicitly corrected.
How to Fix It: Only Set a Channel When There's Been Meaningful Activity
This obvious-sounding fix is straightforward and even has added benefits down the road (keep reading): instead of relying on the 3 default Original Traffic Source values, introduce 3 custom channel properties that are only set when a meaningful sales, product, or marketing interaction actually occurs.
In practice, this means creating a simple, automated workflow that copies Hubspot’s Original Traffic Source into new custom properties (named, for example, 'Original Channel Source', 'Original Channel Source 1', etc.), but only after predefined, meaningful activity criteria are met.
In the outbound scenario above, “meaningful” criteria would typically be logged only when a sales email receives a response, a call is connected, or a meeting is scheduled—not when a contact is uploaded, an email is merely sent, or a number is simply dialed.
This prevents unsent, undelivered, or ignored sales activity from being credited as the driver of a deal. It also aligns outbound logic with how inbound is already treated: a marketing email that’s sent but not clicked, or a 30-second website visit, wouldn’t be considered a meaningful enough touchpoint to represent the first deal-driving interaction. Treating all channels equally leads to signals instead of noise.
Deception #2: Shifting Deal Credit
As we've said, teams need to understand which channels or activities actually drove specific deals. Hubspot attempts to do this by associating the channels that drove related contacts—at the contact or company level—to the deal itself.
This approach breaks down in practice, with two main causes.
First, sales teams often fail to associate any contacts to deals in Hubspot. Doing so is not required and cannot be easily required with a setting change. When there's no contact associated with a deal, Hubspot defaults to looking at all contacts associated with the company and assigns the deal’s channel based on the earliest contact created.
One big issue here is that the original source of the deal will shift when a new, earlier contact is associated with the company, or when the sales team eventually does associate a contact with the deal (which overrides Hubspot's earlier default and magically changes the channel associated with the deal). This means the 10 million in pipeline you attributed to channel x in January, could change to 9 or 11 million when you report on the same month again a month later, sicne the pipeline shifted to another channel. Remember too that this contact may have had no meaningful involvement in the deal at all—for example, a cold lead with no activity, other than being uploaded years ago.
Second, let's say contacts were associated with a deal from the beginning. In this case, sales teams frequently associate only an arbitrary contact, and rarely associate the full group of individuals involved in the deal. So if the contact who originated the deal is missing from the deal record, the channel or activity that drove the deal will be clearly visible at the contact level but not reflected in deal attribution.
In both cases, deals end up attributed to channels that had little or nothing to do with their creation—or reported with shifting channel assignments, significantly undermining confidence in deal-level reporting.
So as soon as you outgrow the stage where a salesperson can reliably choose which contact to associate with a deal based on personal understanding of “who came first,” you need to put in place an automated approach driven by custom logic.
How to Fix It: Use Your Custom Channels and Automate Association
The solution builds directly on the custom channel framework introduced earlier in this article. By limiting deal-level channel logic to your activity-gated custom channels, you prevent meaningless contact associations from driving deal attribution.
A workflow and custom deal channel fields can be configured to reference the first contact with meaningful activity, regardless of whether that contact is explicitly associated with the deal or only exists on the company record. Alternatively you can automate the association with the deal, only when the meaningful custom channel value exists. This removes dependence on perfect manual association while preserving accurate channel-to-deal attribution.
Deception #3: Misleading Categorization
The aforementioned activity-gated channel setup also gives you control over how channels are categorized in the first place. This is important, because Hubspot’s default channel assumptions often don’t match the way your business operates.
For example, Referrals in Hubspot typically mean web referrals—traffic sent from another website, such as a blog post or directory. But many B2B teams rely heavily on human referrals: introductions from customers, investors, partners, or advisors. Under Hubspot’s default logic, these fundamentally different motions are grouped together.
Cutting edge channels are another great example. Think about distinguishing founder or CEO-led LinkedIn from brand social. Or PLG (product led growth) from web-derived sales channels. Hubspot doesn’t accommodate all fledgling channels — which is arguably a good thing — so you need to take the reins yourself by using your custom channels.
When Hubspot's defaults don't serve your business, custom channels allow you to separate the two, you must choose the channel categories that work for you and implement them systematically.
How to Fix It: Use Workflows and Import Keys to Control Original Source
Start by defining your true go-to-market channels. A practical rule of thumb is: if you would make a hiring decision or a material, recurring budget allocation based on a channel’s performance, it deserves its own category in Hubspot.
Once those categories are defined, enforce them in two places:
CSV imports (e.g., field marketing lists, lead scanner files, partnership leads)
Workflows driven by online source criteria (e.g., UTM patterns, referral domains, form paths, or campaign membership)
For imports, you assign a contact’s acquisition channel by populating and mapping Hubspot’s standard first-touch fields: Original source, Original source drill-down 1, and Original source drill-down 2.
For example:
Original source = Referrals → Drill-down = Human Referral
Original source = Social → Drill-down = Founder-led Social
Original source = Offline Sources → Drill-down = Conference Lead
Hubspot locks these values on first touch, which means all downstream attribution, funnel reporting, and revenue analysis will reflect the channel you intentionally assigned.
For digital traffic, use workflows to set these same fields only when a contact meets your predefined conditions (e.g., specific UTMs, referrers, or campaign tags), ensuring that automation aligns with your channel strategy rather than overwriting it.
Tied All Together
The specific business logic, rules, channel priorities, etc. discussed above are up to you—the key is that channel credit is gated by real activity, consistently and accurately associated, and well-categorized.
Once these workflows are in place, all reporting and decision-making should reference the custom channel property instead of Hubspot’s defaults. This restores confidence in channel-level pipeline data.
The impact is foundational!
