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    “There’s all these other reasons that people are finding your company that are not SEO related, but if you just say, ‘Well, they came from organic search; they came from SEO,’ you’re totally wrong.”

    — Chris Strom, ClearPivot

    Marketers know the pain: traffic is up, leads are coming in, but you still don’t know what’s actually working. Your dashboards say “direct” or “organic,” but that’s not the whole story—and it hasn’t been for years.

    In the latest episode of Metrics & Chill, Chris Strom, Principal and Founder at ClearPivot, breaks down why traditional attribution models are broken and what companies can do instead to finally get clarity on the channels driving real pipeline impact.

    Watch the interview

    Or listen to it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

    The Problem: “40% of Your Traffic Is a Black Box”

    For many teams, attribution starts and ends with web analytics tools like Google Analytics. Maybe it’s because they’re free; maybe it’s because they’ve been the default tools for years. 

    As Chris explains, web analytics tools and the pre-defined nature of the sources taught many in the marketing world that the only marketing sources that matter are organic search, direct traffic, referral traffic, and email traffic. 

    But that approach leaves massive gaps.

    “Typically 40% of your traffic is just a black box. You don’t even know where it came from.”

    That “black box” – especially your direct traffic – is especially misleading. 

    “For a long time, people said, well, that’s just people typing in your URL directly into their web browser. But are you really saying that there are 8,000 people every month typing in www.companyname.com into your web browser? Probably not. It’s just that the web analytics tool couldn’t pick it up.”

    That creates a huge risk: investing more budget in what looks good on paper, while ignoring the actual drivers of high-intent leads—like referrals, content, community, or offline exposure.

    The Fix: Blending Self-Reported + Web Attribution

    ClearPivot’s solution is refreshingly simple: ask users how they found you—and use that to inform lead source categorization.

    1. Add a “How Did You Hear About Us?” Field

    Chris recommends making this field open text, not a dropdown, to avoid biasing the response.

    “I’m really not a fan of using a predefined list because that’s biasing the results by making them choose from your own preselected options.”

    This allows responses like:

    • “My friend told me about you”
    • “I follow your founder on LinkedIn”
    • “I saw your ad on TV”
    • “I’ve lived in the neighborhood my whole life”

    These wouldn’t show up in your analytics—but they reveal the true influence behind the visit.

    2. Categorize Responses Internally

    From there, ClearPivot builds a structured “Lead Source” field in HubSpot, populated through a blend of manual review and automation. 

    For example: “If ‘how did you hear about us’ contains coworker, colleague, friend, brother… set lead source to ‘word of mouth.’”

    3. Lead Sources at the Deal Level

    ClearPivot doesn’t stop at the contact level—they also make a separate ‘deal source’ property in the CRM, which includes both the marketing and sales-sourced options.

    By default, they assign the source of the first associated contact to the deal, unless sales overrides with additional context.

    This layered view helps RevOps teams—and marketers—track attribution across the full funnel.

    What They Learned: Attribution Blind Spots Are Bigger Than You Think

    Once companies start collecting real-world attribution data, the blind spots become obvious—and surprising. Chris says word of mouth is a big one

    “The most common thing we see is word of mouth going from being completely not on their radar to realizing, oh, 25% of our business is word of mouth.”

    In one case, ClearPivot discovered that 15-20% of a client’s leads were coming from foot traffic—people who lived nearby and Googled them after driving past a sign.

    For another client, ClearPivot found that while they got a huge volume of leads a year from directory sites, the close rate was extremely low, close to 1.5% – compared to other lead sources with close rates of 20%.

    That insight helped reallocate budget toward higher-quality channels, not just high-volume ones.

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