I recently mentored the CMO of a SaaS scale up on a familiar problem, between 50 and 60 percent of their leads had no attributed source. In a 30 min call, I worked through the CRM data hygiene and lead attribution gap with them, helping them land on a solution that fits their own CRM.
I sat in on a call this week with the CMO and two CRM automation specialists at a SaaS scale up operating across Europe and North America. Smart leadership, a sharp team, and a genuinely interesting product in an up and coming space. They reached out to me to pick my brain on how to approach the channel attribution gap they were seeing with their leads.
One number in particular framed the conversation. Between 50 and 60 percent of their leads had no attributed source, and the useful question was where to start closing that gap.
Here is the framework I walked through on the call, worth running against your own CRM whether your gap is 10 percent or 50.
1. Check your tracking implementation, especially at lead capture. Start with the basics. Is your tagging correctly implemented across the site, and specifically on every page and form where a lead is actually captured? This step sounds obvious, which is exactly why it is the one most often overlooked.
2. Look at how data reaches your CRM. If lead data is passed through to HubSpot via API rather than a native HubSpot form, it will often land as an offline source by default. That is not a bug, it is how the system is designed to handle data it did not capture natively. If a meaningful share of your leads come through integrations, this is frequently where the "unattributed" bucket is quietly filling up.
3. Cross reference your analytics and your CRM. Put your Google Analytics channel report next to your HubSpot source report, given it uses the same attribution model and cookie window, and look for where the two disagree most. The channels with the biggest gap between what your website is showing and what your CRM has recorded are the ones to investigate first.
If you are using custom or non HubSpot native forms, such as Typeform, and seeing a high volume of unattributed leads, there are several ways to tackle this (detailed solutions are always discussed in the HubSpot Solutions community board here). Even with perfect tracking, some attribution will always slip through the cracks, simply because of multi touch, multi device buyer journeys. Build a manual channel source into your process as a safety net, fed by two moments: an exit style question ("how did you hear about us") and sales capturing the same detail during the conversation. This gives you first touch, zero party data you can always lean on when the automated tracking has gaps. We also spoke about using automation to capture this straight from the sales call and chat transcript and fill in the field automatically, so sales are not left to do it manually or own another step in the process.
Gone are the days of spending hours digging through data to diagnose a problem like this. Connecting a Claude connector to your CRM and analytics platforms lets you run that analysis directly, in minutes.
Here is where it gets interesting, and where most businesses lose the value of that safety net without realising it. This particular business had the "how did you hear about us" question sitting at the end of a multi step form, after the thank you page. Only around 30 percent of people bothered to answer it.
The placement was a deliberate choice, made to avoid hurting conversion. But this form sits in front of people already at the MQL to SQL stage, motivated enough to complete every question, so moving it into the main body was unlikely to cost any conversions. Make it one of the core questions instead of an afterthought, and you turn a nice to have into a reliable data source.
You will never fully close the attribution gap, and that is not the goal. What you want is enough reliable data to back channel and budget decisions. Fix your tagging, check your integrations, cross reference your systems, build a manual capture layer people actually answer, and let a tool like Claude carry the heavy analysis for you.
Main image by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash
Nina Jung is a Sydney-based growth strategist who works with founders as a fractional CMO and CRO, bringing senior-level strategy and hands-on execution at a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire. She also mentors early-stage founders and business students through GrowthMentor, Startmate, and UNSW.
