Omnichannel attribution tells you which channels actually produce clients, not just clicks or messages. A prospect might find you through an advert, read two articles, start a chat, then book after a text reminder. If you credit only the last step, chat and SMS look like heroes and the advert looks wasted. This article answers one question: how do you capture the source of every contact and every conversation on the levelpartner.ai platform so your reports show which channels earn revenue, and which only look busy?
Why most firms cannot answer the question
Ask a sales lead where last quarter's clients came from and you usually get a guess. The guess is based on memory, and memory favours the last thing that happened. The advert that introduced the prospect months ago is forgotten. The referral partner who sent three clients gets no credit because the clients rang the office directly.
Attribution fixes this by recording the source at the moment a contact first appears, recording later touches as they happen, and tying all of them to an opportunity with a value. Once those three things are in place, the reports do the remembering.
First touch, last touch and why you need both
First-touch attribution credits the channel that introduced the contact. It tells you what fills the top of your funnel. Last-touch attribution credits the step just before the contact converted, such as a form, a booking or a chat. It tells you what closes.
Neither is the truth on its own. A channel strong on first touch and weak on last touch is a good introducer that needs follow-up behind it. A channel strong on last touch and weak on first touch is closing leads someone else found. Look at both before you cut a budget.
Capture the source everywhere a contact can appear
Every entry point needs to record where the contact came from.
- Forms and surveys: hidden fields that read the campaign tags from the page address.
- Chat: the page the visitor was on and the campaign that brought them, recorded on the new contact.
- Calls: a tracking number per channel, so a call from an advert is credited to the advert.
- Bookings: the calendar link carrying the same campaign tags as your adverts and emails.
- Manual entries: a required source field for staff adding contacts by hand, with a fixed list of options.
Before you start
You need access to Reporting, Opportunities, Sites, Settings and Automation. Agree a naming convention for campaign tags and use it on every outbound link. Make sure each pipeline stage that means "won" is marked as won and every opportunity carries a value. Decide which tracking numbers you need, one per major channel is enough to start.
How to set it up
Most of the work is discipline outside the platform. Write a tagging convention for source, medium and campaign and share it with anyone who creates links. Tag every advert, email button and social link that points to your site. Store the tags on the contact through a source field on each form and survey, give each major channel its own tracking number, and make the source a required choice when staff add a contact by hand. Then check that the data is arriving.
- Open Contacts and select a contact record.
- Find the attribution data under the activity tab.
- Use the exact UTM templates for paid search and paid social.
- Check final URLs for spaces, misspellings and case errors.
Repeat the check on one contact from each channel. When every channel shows a source, compare a month of results with what the sales team believes and investigate any large gap before you trust the numbers.
Reading the results without fooling yourself
Start with won revenue by first-touch source over at least three months. Shorter periods mislead because sales cycles overlap. Then look at last touch for the same period. Write down which channels introduce, which close and which do both.
Suppose an agency wins 30 new clients over six months. By last touch, 18 might trace to the booking calendar and 9 to chat, so paid search looks weak. By first touch, the same 30 could show 14 starting from paid search, 8 from referrals and 6 from organic search. In that case, cutting paid search would remove the starting point for almost half the new clients. The sensible move would be to keep it and add chat to the landing pages it feeds.
Reporting on leads instead of revenue. A channel that brings many cheap enquiries and few clients looks great in a lead report. Always tie attribution to opportunity value and won stages, or the busiest channel will win every budget argument.
What it costs to keep running
Setting up tags, hidden fields and tracking numbers takes one or two days. Keeping it accurate is the real work: someone must check new campaigns are tagged before launch and that opportunities have values. Budget half an hour a week for that check and an hour a month to read the reports with the sales lead.
When attribution is not worth the effort
If almost all your clients come by referral and you spend little on marketing, a simple "how did you hear about us" field is enough. If your volumes are very low, a handful of clients a quarter, the numbers will swing too much to guide decisions. Ask each new client instead.
Accurate attribution depends on conversations being in one shared inbox, so every touch is recorded on the contact. Chat is often a strong closing channel, so splitting live chat between AI and your staff is worth reading alongside this. The rules for which channel each message uses affect what gets credited too. And to make sure chat records the visitor's source, see configuring the live chat widget.
Troubleshooting
Most contacts show no source. Links are untagged or hidden field names do not match the tag names. Check one live advert link and one form, end to end.
Revenue in reports is lower than in the accounts. Some won opportunities have no value, or deals are closed outside the pipeline. Make value required and move every closed deal to a won stage.
Calls all show as direct. Your adverts and website show your main number. Put the channel's tracking number on each channel's pages and adverts.
Sources change after the first visit. A later form overwrites the original source field. Store first-touch source in a field that a workflow fills only if it is empty.
Frequently asked questions
What is omnichannel attribution in simple terms?
It is recording every channel that touched a client on the way to buying, and crediting revenue to those channels in a fair way.
Which attribution model should I use?
Look at first touch and last touch side by side. Together they show which channels introduce clients and which close them.
How long before the reports are useful?
Allow at least one full sales cycle, and ideally three months, before you change a budget based on them.
Does attribution work for phone calls?
Yes, if each channel uses its own tracking number. Calls are then credited to the channel whose number the caller dialled.