How to track G2 and Capterra reviews to B2B pipeline
Review site attribution connects the time buyers spend on G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius to the demos, opportunities, and deals that follow. To do it, tag every link you control on those sites, keep paid listings and free profiles apart, ask buyers on the demo form which site they used, and join those visits to deals in your CRM. Without that setup, review sites show up as a trickle of referral visits while the deals they shaped get credited to Direct or branded search.
B2B buyers often read reviews in the middle of their research, after they know the category and before they talk to sales. That middle position is exactly where last-click reports stop looking. This guide covers why review sites look small in reports, where they sit on the buyer path, the five setup steps, how to treat buyer intent data, and what to report.
Why do review sites look small in attribution reports?
Most of what happens on a review site never reaches your analytics. A buyer reads ten reviews, opens a comparison grid, and shortlists three vendors. None of that is a visit to your site.
When the buyer does come over, it is often days later and by another route. They type your domain, search your brand name, or click a sales email. The click from the review profile, if there was one, is an early touch on a long path. A last-click report gives it nothing.
Some visits that do come straight from a profile arrive with a referrer you never grouped. They sit under g2.com or capterra.com as generic referral traffic, separate from any campaign, and nobody adds them up. Paid listings add another wrinkle, since a paid click and a free profile click from the same site need different labels if you want to judge the spend.
Where do review sites sit on the B2B buyer path?
The common version looks like this. A buyer searches the category on Google or asks an AI assistant. They land on a review site and read about you and two other vendors. A few days later they visit your site, book a demo, and an opportunity opens.
The first two steps are invisible to your tracking. The last three are visible, and the job is linking them back to the review site. Once a buyer fills out a form, their earlier anonymous visits can join their Contact record, which we cover in how identity resolution connects anonymous visits to B2B pipeline. That join is what keeps a G2 referral from three weeks ago on the deal.
Review sites also show up in AI answers. When a buyer asks an assistant for the best tools in your category, the answer often draws on review site content. Our AI search attribution questions, answered covers how to track those visits.
How do you set up review site tracking?
Work through these steps once, in order, then leave the naming alone.
- Tag every profile link. Most review profiles let you add a link to your website. Add UTMs to every one: utm_source=g2 or utm_source=capterra, utm_medium=review_site, and a utm_campaign that names the profile. Our list of UTM mistakes that send B2B deals to Direct covers the naming traps.
- Split paid from free. If you pay for a Capterra listing or a premium G2 profile, give the paid destination URL its own utm_campaign. Then you can judge the paid spend on pipeline instead of clicks, and real CAC for the listing stops mixing with free traffic.
- Ask on the demo form. List each review site by name in your "How did you hear about us?" field, with a free-text box next to it. Buyers who typed your URL after reading reviews will often say so. Our self-reported attribution checklist shows how to word and store the answer.
- Keep intent data separate. Intent feeds from review sites describe accounts, not visits. The next section covers how to use them.
- Join visits to deals. Make sure every tagged visit can reach a Contact, an opportunity, and a closed-won deal in HubSpot or whatever CRM you run.
How should you count buyer intent data from review sites?
G2 and TrustRadius both sell buyer intent data. It tells you which companies viewed your profile, your category, or a comparison page. That is useful for sales, and it is a different kind of record from a visit.
Treat intent data as an account signal. It says a company was researching. It does not say which person, and it does not mean anyone visited your site. Keep it out of the attribution model as a touch, or the same research gets counted twice once that buyer clicks through.
Use it as a column next to the deal instead. When a closed-won account also showed up in review site intent before its first visit, note it. Over a few quarters you will see how often the accounts that close were researching on review sites first. If you already run account-based reporting, ABM attribution without losing the buyer's path covers how account signals and person-level touches fit together.
Which numbers belong in the review site report?
Lead with pipeline, split by site and by paid or free:
- Tracked pipeline. Opportunities with a tagged review site visit anywhere on the path.
- Self-reported mentions. Demo forms where the buyer named a review site.
- Revenue. Closed-won deals where either of the first two appears.
- Cost per opportunity for paid listings. Listing spend divided by the opportunities it touched.
Report review sites as an assist as well as a source. They rarely start or close a deal on their own, and the way to show their middle-of-path value is covered in assisted conversions: credit for the touches before the click. Use a lookback that covers your full sales cycle too, since a review read in month one can sit far from a contract signed in month five. The attribution window for long B2B sales cycles explains how to set it.
The usual mistakes are easy to spot. Untagged profile links send visits to generic referral traffic. Paid and free clicks share one label, so nobody can judge the listing. And intent data gets counted as a touch, which inflates the channel.
How Source tracks review site visits
Source installs with one pixel or Google Tag Manager, with no data warehouse to build. It records the UTMs and referrers on every visit, keeps a buyer's earlier anonymous visits once they fill out a form, and ties the full multi-touch path to Contacts and Deals in your CRM. View-through, offline, and LLM attribution for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini sit on the same path.
You get real CAC, goals, and channel quality in one place, so a paid listing is judged on the deals it touched. 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 see which deals your review profiles touched.