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Most marketing dashboards are built around activity metrics: impressions, clicks, sessions, page views. These feel good but don't answer the question that matters:
"Did my marketing work?"
Dialed is built around outcomes: leads, pipeline, customers, revenue. Everything else is context.
This guide explains how we measure your marketing — the metrics we track, how attribution works, how email influence proves your nurture is working, and how AI insights turn your data into answers.
Dialed tracks your marketing performance through a simple funnel:
Leads → MQLs → Opportunities → Customers → Revenue
Each stage represents a meaningful milestone in turning marketing activity into business results.
Lead: A unique person who converted on your site. We count each person once, even if they fill out multiple forms. This is your first-touch conversion.
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead): A lead that meets your quality bar. In HubSpot, this is when a contact's lifecycle stage becomes "Marketing Qualified Lead."
Meeting: When a lead schedules a meeting through a meetings link.
Opportunity: A lead that sales has identified as having real potential. This is when a contact's lifecycle stage becomes "Opportunity."
Customer: A closed deal. This is when a contact's lifecycle stage becomes "Customer."
Revenue: The total amount from closed-won deals attributed to your marketing.
CVR (Conversion Rate): Leads ÷ Sessions × 100
What percentage of visitors became leads?
MQL Rate: MQLs ÷ Leads × 100
What percentage of leads became marketing qualified?
CPL (Cost Per Lead): Spend ÷ Leads
How much did each lead cost?
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): Spend ÷ Customers
How much did each customer cost?
ROI (Return on Investment): (Revenue - Spend) ÷ Spend × 100
For every dollar spent, how much did we get back?
When someone converts on your site, we need to know which campaign gets credit. This is attribution — and we've made deliberate choices about how it works.
There are many attribution models: first-touch, last-touch, linear, time-decay, position-based. We chose first-touch for B2B marketing because:
Marketing's job is demand creation. The campaign that introduced someone to your brand did the hardest work — getting attention in a noisy world.
B2B buying cycles are long. Someone might discover you through an ad, come back through organic search, then convert through an email. Giving credit to the email ignores the ad that started the journey.
It's actionable. First-touch tells you which campaigns are filling the top of funnel. That's what you can control.
It's honest. Last-touch attribution often credits branded search or direct traffic — which tells you nothing about what actually drove demand.
When a conversion happens, Dialed follows a priority order to determine which Initiative gets credit:
Priority 1 (Highest): Landing Page URL Match
The URL where conversion happened matches a page linked to an Initiative.
Priority 2: UTM Campaign Match
The utm_campaign parameter matches an Initiative name.
Priority 3: Ad ID Match
The visitor came from an ad linked to an Initiative.
Priority 4 (Fallback): Evergreen Pages
No match found — conversion is unattributed.
Landing page matching is primary. When someone converts at yoursite.com/pricing-calculator and that page is linked to your "Pricing Calculator" Initiative, the lead is attributed there. This is why associating landing pages with Initiatives is so important.
How Meetings Are Attributed
Meetings inherit attribution from the contact who booked them. If someone became a Lead through your Pricing Calculator Initiative and later books a meeting, that meeting is credited to Pricing Calculator — not wherever they clicked the scheduling link. This keeps your funnel connected from first touch through sales engagement.
When someone fills out three forms on your site, that's one lead — not three. We deduplicate by email address and count the first conversion.
Why? Because you're trying to measure how many people your marketing reached, not how many form submissions you generated. One engaged person is more valuable than three form fills from bot traffic.
We split your leads into two buckets:
Paid Leads came from Meta ads, LinkedIn ads, or UTM-tracked links. They have a cost associated with them.
Organic Leads came from search engines, direct visits, referrals, or other free sources. No ad spend required.
Your blended CPL includes organic leads. If you're generating 50 leads and 20 are organic, your blended CPL is lower than your true paid CPL. Both numbers are useful—blended shows overall efficiency, paid-only shows true acquisition cost.
Initiatives are the foundation of everything in Dialed. They're how we organize your marketing efforts, track performance, and — most importantly — how we know which campaigns to credit when someone becomes a lead.
An Initiative is a marketing campaign or program you want to track as a unit. It's the container that connects your landing pages, ads, links, and messaging together so you can measure their collective impact.
Examples:
When you look at the Pipeline by Initiative table, here's what you're seeing:
Spent: Ad spend from ads linked to this Initiative.
Leads: Unique people who converted on pages linked to this Initiative.
MQLs → Customers: Lifecycle stage changes in HubSpot for attributed contacts.
Meetings: Booked meetings with contacts attributed to this Initiative.
Revenue: Closed-won deal value from customers attributed to this Initiative.
ROI: Calculated from Revenue and Spent.
This is full-funnel attribution. You can see which Initiatives don't just generate leads — they generate revenue.
Every Dialed account comes with a built-in Evergreen Initiative for your always-on pages:
Use Evergreen for: Pages that run continuously, not tied to a time-bound campaign.
Don't use Evergreen for: Product launches, events, specific lead magnets, or anything you want to measure separately.
Most email tools show you opens and clicks. That's activity. Dialed shows you whether your emails actually moved people through the funnel.
When you connect HubSpot, Dialed imports your marketing emails and tracks engagement by Initiative — the same way it tracks ads. The Email Performance table shows:
Click into any Initiative row to see individual email performance in the Detail view.
This is where Dialed goes beyond what HubSpot can tell you. Email influence answers a specific question: "Did my emails help move people to MQL or Customer?"
Here's what we mean. Say someone discovers you through a Pricing Calculator ad (that's their first-touch Initiative). Over the next few weeks, they receive emails from your Reconnect Q4 nurture sequence — they open two and click one. Then they become an MQL.
First-touch attribution credits Pricing Calculator with that MQL. That's accurate — the ad created the demand. But your Reconnect Q4 emails did real work too. They kept that person engaged and nudged them toward qualification.
Dialed tracks this with two metrics:
MQLs Influenced: Distinct contacts who engaged with an Initiative's emails (opened or clicked) within 30 days before becoming an MQL.
Revenue Influenced: Revenue from customers who engaged with an Initiative's emails within 30 days before their deal closed.
These appear in the Email Performance table, so you can see both engagement and influence side by side.
Without influence tracking, nurture programs look like they do nothing. Open rates and click rates are engagement metrics — they don't prove impact. Email influence connects engagement to outcomes: "This Initiative's emails influenced 8 MQLs worth $32K in revenue."
That's the difference between "nurture is working" and "nurture got 892 clicks."
You have the data. But do you have time to analyze it?
Dialed's AI Insights analyze your full attribution chain — ad spend through landing pages through conversions through pipeline through revenue — and surface what's actually working, what needs attention, and what's worth exploring.
Instead of digging through tables and comparing numbers manually, Insights gives you a summary of your reporting period with specific, data-backed observations. Examples:
Insights are available for completed reporting periods (monthly, quarterly, or annual). Once a period ends, click "Generate Insights" on the Reports Summary view. Dialed aggregates your data — Initiative performance, ad metrics and copy, email engagement and influence, period-over-period trends — and analyzes it.
Insights are organized into tabs: Summary, Lead Gen, Email, and Paid. Each insight is labeled with a sentiment — Win (what's working), Watch (what needs attention), or Explore (opportunities to investigate).
Other AI tools can write marketing copy. They can't tell you which copy converts — because they don't have your attribution data.
Dialed's insights are built on your actual funnel: which ad headlines drove leads, which nurture emails influenced MQLs, which Initiatives generated revenue. The AI compares everything to your baseline, not arbitrary industry benchmarks. A 20% open rate might be great for your cold outreach and terrible for your warm nurture — Insights know the difference because they see both.
Insights only generate on completed periods — no misleading conclusions from partial data. Small sample sizes get caveats ("early signal" or "promising") rather than false confidence. And campaigns optimized for traffic aren't penalized for low conversions, because that was never their goal.
Get your setup right, and your reports tell you exactly what's working. Here's the checklist:
1. Add your landing page(s) to Dialed
Go to Web Pages and either import from HubSpot or add manually. Without landing pages in Dialed, there's nothing to match conversions against.
2. Create the Initiative
Give it a clear, descriptive name that you'll also use in your UTM parameters.
3. Associate the landing page(s) with the Initiative
This is the critical step most people skip. When someone converts on an associated landing page, the lead is automatically attributed to this Initiative.
4. Link your ads to the Initiative
This connects your spend data to your leads, giving you accurate CPL and ROI.
5. Assign your emails to the InitiativeAfter syncing from HubSpot, assign marketing emails to the appropriate Initiative. This enables both engagement tracking and influence attribution in your reports.
6. Use consistent UTM parameters
utm_sourcePlatform (meta, linkedin, google)
utm_mediumChannel type (paid_social, cpc, email)
utm_campaignInitiative name (use underscores:
pricing_calculator)
Check Reports → Pipeline by Initiative. Verify leads are appearing under the correct Initiative. Monitor that the Evergreen count isn't growing unexpectedly. Check Email Performance to confirm your emails are showing engagement and, over time, influence.
Initiative: Pricing Calculator Launch
/pricing-calculator — All conversions on this page are attributed here.utm_campaign=pricing_calculator — Spend, impressions, and clicks are tracked here.utm_campaign=pricing_calculator — Email-driven conversions are attributed here.Reports show: Spent → Leads → MQLs → Opps → Customers → Revenue → ROI, plus email influence showing nurture impact on pipeline.
Each landing page can only be associated with one Initiative. If a page serves multiple campaigns, you'll need to decide which one gets credit. Use dedicated landing pages per Initiative when possible. If you must share a page, use UTM parameters to differentiate traffic.
Too many small Initiatives. 50 Initiatives with 2 leads each tells you nothing. Consolidate related efforts into broader Initiatives.
Forgetting organic pages. Blog posts and organic content generate leads too. Associate them with Evergreen or a dedicated Content/SEO Initiative.
Inconsistent UTM naming. pricing_calculator, Pricing Calculator, and pricing-calc look like three different campaigns. Pick a convention (lowercase with underscores) and stick to it.
Not assigning emails. Synced emails that aren't assigned to an Initiative won't appear in Email Performance reports, and influence tracking won't work. Assign emails right after syncing.
A few things we do differently — and why.
Instead of showing every UTM source (meta, facebook, instagram, google, hs_automation...), we group into buckets: Paid, Email, Direct, Organic.
This answers the question that matters: "How much of my success is paid vs. earned?"
In most tables, CVR = Leads ÷ Sessions. But in the Paid Performance table, CVR = Leads ÷ Clicks.
Sessions-based CVR answers: "How well does my site convert traffic?"Clicks-based CVR answers: "How well do my ads convert clickers?"
For paid ads, clicks-based is more actionable because you pay per click, not per session.
SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads): Many companies don't use this stage, or it's redundant with Opportunities. We track it but hide it by default to reduce noise.
Sessions as a headline metric: Traffic is a means, not a goal. We show sessions in tables for context, but your job isn't to get traffic — it's to get customers.
Pipeline by Initiative shows first-touch attribution — which Initiative generated the lead. Email influence shows which Initiative's emails nurtured the lead. These are different questions with different answers, so we keep them in separate tables. This avoids confusion and double-counting while giving you both views.
Dialed measures what matters: outcomes, not activity.
Set this up right, and your reports answer the only question that matters: "Is my marketing working?"
You run the ads, write the emails, manage the CRM, and build the reports. Dialed handles the last part so you can focus on the rest.
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