Create custom and attribution reports

Default reports answer standard questions. Custom reports answer your questions. "How many contacts from the biotech industry became MQLs last quarter?" "Which campaign generated the most pipeline?" "What's the conversion rate from our pricing page by traffic source?"

These are the questions that drive real marketing decisions, and they require reports built specifically for your business, your properties, and your funnel.

HubSpot's custom report builder lets you combine data from multiple objects (contacts, companies, deals), filter by any property, and visualise the results in charts, tables, or numbers. Attribution reports go a step further: they show which marketing touchpoints contributed to contact creation, deal creation, and revenue.

Single-object reports

The simplest custom report analyses one object type. You pick the object (contacts, companies, deals, or tickets), choose which properties to report on, add filters, and select a visualisation.

Go to Reporting and Data > Dashboards > Add Report > Create Report > Single Object. Select your object (e.g. Contacts). HubSpot shows a builder with three tabs: Data, Filters, and Visualisation.

Data tab. Add the properties you want to analyse. For example: lifecycle stage, industry, create date, original source.

Filters tab. Narrow the dataset. The default filter is usually "Create date is this quarter". Change it to match your question. Add filters for specific lifecycle stages, regions, industries, or any other property.

Visualisation tab. Drag your categorical property (e.g. industry) into the axis box and your metric (e.g. contact count) into the value box. Choose a chart type: bar, pie, donut, table.

Example: "Contacts by industry, created this year" uses contacts as the object, industry as the category, contact count as the metric, and create date filtered to "this year".

Multi-object reports (custom report builder)

When you need to combine data from multiple objects, use the custom report builder. This lets you report on, say, companies with associated deals, or contacts who are linked to specific deal stages.

The process follows five steps: select data sources (which objects), choose properties from each object, add filters, set the visualisation, and save.

Go to Reporting and Data > Create Report > Custom Report Builder. Select your primary and secondary data sources. The builder shows which objects can be combined based on HubSpot's association model (contacts are associated with companies, companies with deals, etc.).

Multi-object reports are powerful but more complex. Start with single-object reports for your first few custom builds.

The planning step most people skip

Before opening the report builder, sketch out what you want the final report to look like. What's on the X axis? What's on the Y axis? What filters apply? What chart type tells the story?

This takes two minutes on paper and saves twenty minutes of clicking around in the builder. The custom report builder has a lot of options, and it's easy to get lost if you don't have a clear destination.

Attribution reports

Attribution reports answer the question: "Which marketing activities contributed to this outcome?" They trace the path from first interaction to contact creation, deal creation, or revenue.

HubSpot offers several attribution models:

First touch. 100% of the credit goes to the first interaction. Useful for understanding what brings people in the door.

Last touch. 100% of the credit goes to the last interaction before the conversion. Useful for understanding what closes the deal.

Linear. Equal credit across all touchpoints. Fair but doesn't highlight which interactions mattered most.

U-shaped. 40% to first touch, 40% to the last touch before conversion, 20% split across middle interactions. Good for understanding both acquisition and conversion.

W-shaped. Splits credit across first touch, lead creation, and opportunity creation. Adds a middle milestone.

Full-path. Splits credit across four key milestones plus remaining interactions.

Time decay. More credit to recent interactions, less to earlier ones.

Contact create attribution is available with Marketing Hub Professional. Deal create and revenue attribution require Marketing Hub Enterprise. If you're on Professional, start with contact create attribution: it shows which channels and content drive new leads.

Using the AI report assistant

HubSpot has an AI assistant that generates single-object reports from natural language prompts. Go to Reporting and Data > Create Report and select the AI Assistant option. Type what you want: "Show me contacts created this year by job title" or "How many deals closed last quarter by source?"

The AI generates a draft report that you can customise. It currently works for single-object reports only (not multi-object or attribution), but it's a useful starting point when you're not sure how to structure a report.

Custom and attribution reports are how you move from "our marketing is working" to "here's exactly which activities drive results and here's where we should invest more". Start with single-object reports for straightforward questions, graduate to multi-object reports when you need cross-object analysis, and use attribution reports to connect marketing activities to business outcomes.