If you're a founder or senior marketing leader, you know that stomach-turning feeling when a huge budget is spent but you can't pinpoint with certainty where your truly qualified leads came from.
To be clear: This isn't just about wasted money, it's about the emotional and personal cost of having misaligned teams and chasing leads that were never going to close. We've all been there - throwing money at a channel because "everyone else is doing it", only to realize that the real ROI was... confusing.
The good news is that HubSpot is designed to answer exactly that question, but the path to clarity isn't always obvious. It requires you to understand a few key concepts. This is a practical guide to using the tools you already have and finding your best lead sources.
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The Confusing Trilogy: Understanding HubSpot's 'Source' Properties
HubSpot uses a few different "source" properties, and mixing them up is the number one reason why leaders lose sleep over reports. You need to know the difference.
1. Original Source
This property is the most important for attribution. HubSpot automatically records the first time a contact interacted with your company and classifies it in a high-level group (e.g. Organic Search, Paid Media, Email Marketing, Direct Traffic).
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Why itmatters: It tells you where the relationship began. You can't change this property - HubSpot defines it, which makes it reliable.
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Best use: Group your marketing channels to see which ones are generating new relationships.
2. Traffic Source
This is the next level of detail down from Original Source. If Original Source is 'Organic Search', Traffic Source will specify the actual search engine (Google, Bing) and the specific landing page.
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Why itmatters: It provides the granular context your marketing team needs to optimize its efforts. For example, knowing that "Organic Search" works is good; knowing that Google traffic to the
page/priceconverts better is immediate action.
3. Lead Source (The Context of the Team)
This is typically a customized property that you or your Sales/Operations team creates. Unlike the two above, this is often defined manually, or through a simple workflow, to reflect your internal processes.
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Why it matters: Sales generally uses this to define how a lead became qualified. For example, a salesperson might select "Inbound - Website Form" versus "Outbound - Cold Call".
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Best use: Reporting on the team's operational effort and ensuring alignment between Marketing and Sales definitions.
Beyond Standards: The Reports You're Already Paying For
You don't always have to start from scratch. HubSpot has powerful report templates that address exactly this challenge, although you may need a Professional subscription to get the full benefit.
The Standard Reports (Starter and Higher)
The Traffic Analysis and Contact Analysis reports are your starting point.
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Sources Report: Found in Reports > Analysis Tools, this standard report details your Contacts and Sessions by Original Source property. This is your first step in proving which high-level channels are bringing people in.
Custom Reports (Professional and Enterprise)
To find the most qualified leads, you need to link the source data (from the Contact object) with the qualification data (from the Deal or Contact object).
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Define "Qualified": Before building the report, ask yourself: Is a qualified lead a contact with "Lead Status" as SQL? Or is it a deal that has been Closed Won? The Closed Won deal is the real qualified lead.
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Use the Custom Report Builder: You need a Cross-Object Report. This allows you to combine data, typically Contacts with Deals. You can filter the deals by Deal Stage = Closed Won and then drill down into the resulting Contacts by their Original Source.
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The Result: A clear visual graph showing which Original Sources delivered the most revenue-notjust the most traffic.
The Turning Point: Why Attribution Models Matter
Whether you're on a Professional or Enterprise plan, you have access to Attribution Reports, which is how you get out of the "First Touch" round.
Attribution is the process of giving credit to all the marketing efforts that contributed to a closed deal. The Original Source property only gives credit for the very first click. But in reality, your customer probably read a blog post, clicked on a social ad, downloaded an eBook and then finally converted.
To find the origin of your most qualified leads (i.e. leads that became customers), you should look at multi-touch attribution.
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First Touch: Gives 100% of the credit to the first interaction (the Original Source). Simple, but ignores everything else.
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Last Touch: Gives 100% of the credit to the last interaction before the conversion. Simple, but ignores the beginning.
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Full-Path: This is the answer for leads. It credits all the intermediate steps (First, Last, Middle) and gives a more realistic view of how your marketing channels work together to get a qualified lead to become a customer.
You don't need to be a data scientist to get started with this. Just go to Reports > Reports > Create Report > Attribution and start experimenting with the Full-Path model, linking it to your Closed Won deals. You can find more information about how this works in the HubSpot Academy.
The Hard Truth: HubSpot's Feature Limitations per Hub
This is the part where we talk about budget-my favorite topic. The tool you need to confidently answer this question is directly linked to your subscription level.
The clarity you get about your sources of qualified leads increases with the version of your HubSpot Marketing Hub:
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Marketing Hub Starter: You get Basic Reports (Traffic Sources, Contact Sources). This is Good for Volume, Bad for Qualification. You can see which channels bring in the most people, but you can't easily connect that to business or revenue. Your data will be siloed.
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Marketing Hub Professional: You unlock Custom Reports (Cross-Object) and Basic Multi-Touch Attribution. This gives you Solid Clarity. You can build the reports you need to link the original source of a contact to the Closed Won deal and see the full path journey.
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Marketing Hub Enterprise: You get Advanced Custom Reports (Data Sets) and Full Multi-Touch Attribution, plus Predictive Lead Scoring. If you're paying for Enterprise, you get the full set of tools to not only see where your qualified leads come from, but also build models that predict them. You have no excuse not to have this data.
The key takeaway for any leader is this: If you're operating on a Starter plan, your data will always be siloed. Once you scale beyond a few salespeople, the move to Professional isn't just a cost; it's an investment in the operational clarity needed to prioritize your budget and reclaim your personal time.
You don't need another expensive consultant or a new tool. You just need to look at the right properties and the right reports. The answer to your question "where are my best leads?" is already waiting for you in your CRM.
Ready to stop guessing and start scaling with confidence? Learn how to simplify your operations and maximize your investment in HubSpot with the support of Dig Revops.
Schedule a conversation about lead source identification with Dig Revops