Essential Inputs and Infrastructure for Attribution Reporting Success

Attribution reporting is only useful if the data underneath it is structured, consistent, and meaningful. Without tracking the right dimensions and events, and without a well-organised reporting structure, your attribution reports can be confusing, misleading, inaccurate, or just plain unhelpful.

In this guide, we break down metrics, metadata, and infrastructure you need to attribution reports you can truly trust and act on.

Track Key Content Dimensions

There are endless ways to organise your content strategy: by theme, type, product or feature, message or brand value, region, audience, call to action (CTA), author, keyword cluster, department, etc. Attribution reporting helps you figure out which of those choices are actually driving outcomes.

At Eleven Writing, we use the following dimensions to track content performance for our partners:

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You can manage these dimensions in a spreadsheet or a content database, such as Notion, Airtable, or Google Sheets. The important part is consistent tagging, so the metadata can be used for grouping and analysis in tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4), BigQuery, or Looker Studio—without needing to hard-code anything.

Go Beyond Page Views—Track Events and Interactions

Page views are a nice metric, but they don’t tell the full story. For attribution, you need to understand what people do when they engage with your content.

To do this, you should track:

• Scroll depth (e.g., 25%, 75%)
• CTA clicks
• Video views or downloads
• Time on page (via engagement time in GA4)

These can reveal high-value content that plays a key role in engagement or conversion. For example, a thought leadership article may attract lower organic traffic but generate high engagement, with users scrolling deeply and spending a significant amount of time on the page. Likewise, a blog article may have relatively low traffic, but it can still compel readers to download an eBook or schedule a meeting. 

Tracking these events in GA4, HubSpot, or other tools is essential to maximising your attribution report. For the best results, remember to:

• Customise your events in HubSpot or in GA4 to track additional interactions. With default settings, you’ll often miss key events, and your data can end up lacking accuracy or necessary context.

• Define key conversions. Identify the business actions that matter (e.g., demo requests, downloads, product trials) and explicitly define them as conversion events.
  
  
• Don’t ignore engagement time. GA4 no longer tracks bounce rate, so use engagement time to assess how long users actively interact with content.
  
  
• Don’t overlook data validation. Misconfigured events or missing tags in Google Tag Manager (GTM) can create data gaps. Use GA4’s DebugView regularly to ensure your tracking stays accurate.

Set Up Your Data Infrastructure the Right Way

Attribution isn’t just about tracking data—it’s also about how well your data is managed and modelled. Here are the elements to get right:

Match data granularity to your attribution model

Different attribution models require varying levels of data granularity (detail). If you’re using First- or Last-Touch Attribution, you only need one touchpoint per user journey. Using Multi-Touch or Time-Decay Attribution? You need the full sequence—each touchpoint, with metadata and timestamps.

The more granular your data, the more flexible your analysis, but also the more expensive and slower it becomes, especially in BigQuery or when powering real-time dashboards.

That’s why we advise starting with the attribution model you plan to use and storing only the data you need for that model. You can always expand from there.

Keep data consistent and well-organised

Inconsistent or messy metadata creates issues that are hard to spot and harder to fix. To prevent this:

• Use consistent naming conventions for all campaigns, content types, UTMs, CTAs, etc.

• Standardise capitalisation (otherwise, e.g., “linkedin” and “LinkedIn” could be interpreted as two different sources). 

• Define deduplication rules for repeated events (based on session IDs, timestamps, or event IDs).

• Create aggregation rules for common metrics like sessions, page views, and assisted conversions.

• Build error handling and validation checks (e.g., flag missing utm_medium, invalid URLs, or empty parameters before analysis).

Set your lookback windows intentionally

The lookback window defines how far back a content touchpoint is eligible to receive credit for a conversion. A seven-day lookback window, for example, means that only content the user interacted with in the seven days before their conversion may receive credit for that conversion. 

To determine the ideal lookback window, start by considering the length of your standard sales cycle. 

For example, short lookback windows (e.g., 7–14 days) are often suitable for fast, transactional sales. Meanwhile, longer windows (e.g., 30–90 days) are generally required for content-led or B2B sales with longer buying cycles.

Also, choose your window based on actual user behaviour. For instance, if most users convert within 21 days of their first touch, use that as your baseline. Likewise, a blog article viewed three months ago probably has little bearing on a user’s conversion compared to more recent content. All the same, it would be wrong to assume that only content viewed in the last 24 hours is relevant.

Once you’ve set your lookback window, adjust it in GA4, BigQuery, or your tool of choice. GA4 allows some flexibility (30–90 days for non-acquisition events), but BigQuery lets you define custom lookbacks based on segment, funnel stage, or content type.

Conclusion

Good attribution reporting depends on tracking what users actually do and using a setup that fits the way your audience converts. To get the best insights, make sure your data is consistent, your events are meaningful, and your reports reflect real behaviour. 

At Eleven Writing, we help companies build content strategies that are measurable from the start. Want to learn what we can do for you? Drop us a line today.