A marketing attribution playbook for your first 90 days

October 24, 2026

Marketing attribution playbook for the first 90 days header: scattered dashed paths around an AUDIT node join one glowing thread that ends at a bright, fully connected REPORT node

A new B2B marketing lead can get marketing attribution working in 90 days by doing three things in order: audit what gets tracked in the first month, connect site visits to CRM deals in the second, and report pipeline and real CAC by channel in the third. Skip the order and you end up presenting numbers in month two that nobody trusts by month four.

This playbook is for the person who just joined, inherited a dashboard, and has been asked which channels are working. It covers what to do each month, who to bring in, and what the day 90 report should say.

What should the first 90 days of marketing attribution look like?

Think of it as three stages, each one depending on the last. You cannot credit channels you do not track, and you cannot report CAC until visits and deals live in the same place.

Marketing attribution playbook for the first 90 days: audit tracking in days 1 to 30, connect visits to CRM contacts and deals in days 31 to 60, and report pipeline and real CAC by channel in days 61 to 90 — The 90-day playbook in three stages. Each stage depends on the one before it.

Resist the pull to rebuild everything in week one. The first month is for finding out what is true about your current data. Most new leads find the dashboard they inherited is not wrong so much as incomplete.

What should you audit in the first 30 days?

Start with tracking, because every later report sits on top of it. Pick five recent customers and try to trace how each one found you. Where the trail breaks tells you what to fix first.

Marketing attribution audit checklist for month one: tracking on every page, UTMs on every paid link, click IDs saved on the visit, forms that pass source to the CRM, a how did you hear about us field, and a written Direct baseline — Six checks for the first month. Run them before you share any channel numbers.

Tracking on every page. Confirm your tag fires on the site, the pricing page, the signup flow, and the app. Gaps on the signup step are common and costly.
UTMs on every paid link. Pull the live ads in Google Ads and LinkedIn and check each one carries campaign tags from a single naming sheet. Our list of UTM mistakes that send B2B deals to Direct covers what usually goes wrong.
Click IDs saved on the visit. Store the UTMs and ad click IDs when someone lands, not only when they fill out a form weeks later.
Forms that pass source to the CRM. Open five recent contacts and see whether the original source made it through.
A "how did you hear about us" field. One free-text question on the demo form catches podcasts, referrals, and AI answers that tracking misses.
Your Direct share, written down. Note what percentage of signups land in Direct today. It is your baseline, and it should fall as fixes land.

The free-text answers take a little setup to read well. Our self-reported attribution checklist for B2B teams walks through the question wording and how to group the answers.

How do you connect attribution to the CRM in days 31 to 60?

Month two is where marketing attribution turns into B2B attribution. A visit is only useful once you can follow it to a contact, an opportunity, and a closed deal in HubSpot, Salesforce, or whatever CRM your team runs.

Three pieces of work matter most here:

Join anonymous visits to the person. Buyers often visit several times before they convert. When they sign up, their earlier visits should attach to the same record instead of disappearing.
Agree on lifecycle stages. Sit down with sales and RevOps and settle what counts as a lead, an opportunity, and a customer. Fix duplicate contacts and missing deal associations while you are at it. Our guide to CRM hygiene that keeps B2B attribution trustworthy lists the usual culprits.
Pick one model and write down why. Position-based or linear multi-touch works for most B2B teams. Keep last click next to it as a reference, not as the answer.

This is also the month to settle credit disputes before they start. If sales and marketing both expect credit for the same deal, agree on the rules now. We wrote about that in when sales and marketing both claim the same deal.

What should you report at day 90?

Keep it short. Leadership wants to know where pipeline came from, what it cost, and what you plan to change. Five lines usually cover it.

Day 90 marketing attribution report with five lines: pipeline by channel, real CAC by channel, channel quality, AI search and dark social, and what changes next quarter — The day 90 report. The last line matters most, because it turns the data into a decision.

Pipeline by channel. Show your multi-touch number beside the last-click number. The gap between them is credit your earlier channels were missing.
Real CAC by channel. Include spend and the people or agency costs behind each channel, divided by customers won. Our piece on how to read CAC by channel when B2B deals take months explains why the time window matters.
Channel quality. Compare how often visits from each channel become deals, not only leads. Cheap leads that never close are not cheap.
AI search and dark social. Report tracked referrals from ChatGPT and other assistants next to what buyers write in the form field.
What changes next quarter. One budget move and one test. That line is the reason the report exists.

If the report is headed to the board, trim it to one page. How to put marketing attribution on the board slide shows what to keep and what to leave off.

Who needs to be involved?

Attribution is a team project even when one person owns it. RevOps or whoever runs the CRM owns stages and data quality. Sales leadership agrees on credit rules. Finance signs off on what goes into CAC. Whoever manages the site installs and checks the tracking.

A 30-minute check-in at the end of each month keeps everyone on the same numbers. Bring the Direct baseline from month one, so the group can see the fixes working.

What slows this playbook down?

Presenting channel ROI in month one. Early numbers stick in people's heads, even after you correct them.
Starting a warehouse project. Building pipelines and models before the basics are tracked can eat the whole quarter.
Changing models every month. Pick one, explain it, and leave it alone long enough to compare quarters.
Ignoring untracked channels. Podcasts, communities, and AI answers still shape deals. Use the form field until tracking catches up, and read how LLM attribution handles ChatGPT traffic for the AI side.

How Source fits the 90 days

Source installs with one pixel or Google Tag Manager, with no data warehouse to build, which shortens month one. It records UTMs and referrers on every visit, keeps a buyer's earlier anonymous visits once they convert, and ties the full multi-touch path to contacts and deals in your CRM, which covers most of month two.

For month three, you get real CAC by channel, goals, and channel quality in one place, with view-through, offline, and LLM attribution for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. You can chat with your data, read AI recommendations, and get daily Slack reports. Source is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, and customer data is not used to train external models.

Start free at dash.source.app/signup and have your day 90 report ready well before day 90.