Question from user:
We don’t have the marketing intelligence package, so we are evaluating tools to create our attribution model
Answer from Nabil:
That’s a smart move to look into building your own attribution model since you don’t have the full marketing intelligence suite.
The combination of Salesforce API, Account Engagement API, Google Analytics Data API, Looker Studio API, Google Tag Manager, and a server-side solution like Stape or Google Cloud Platform is an incredibly powerful and flexible way to achieve sophisticated attribution for a low cost.
The core idea is to establish a robust data foundation by collecting and centralizing information from all key touchpoints.
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is essential here for implementing your tracking code consistently across your website, firing custom events, and ensuring data quality.
When paired with a server-side solution like Stape or Google Cloud Platform, you can send data directly to your own server before forwarding it to various services, which significantly improves data reliability and privacy.
Server-side tagging helps you get around browser-side ad blockers and limitations, making your tracking more resilient.
You can also clean and enrich the data on the server, ensuring it’s standardized before it hits your analytics.
The collection layer then gets seriously bolstered by the APIs.
Salesforce API gives you access to crucial CRM data related to leads, contacts, and opportunities, providing the ultimate conversion truth and value.
Account Engagement (Pardot) API brings in your marketing automation data, showing you email opens, form submissions, and prospect activity before the sale.
The Google Analytics Data API (GA4) provides the web-behavior data, linking user sessions, traffic sources, and key user actions – which you can standardize using Google’s purchase, add_to_cart, begin_checkout, and generate_lead Standard Events.
By using these APIs, you pull the raw, structured data out of these silos, rather than relying on their potentially limited internal reporting tools.
Once you have this consolidated raw data, the integration and transformation happens.
You’d typically use a tool or code (often within Google Cloud Platform or another data warehouse) to clean, de-duplicate, and stitch this customer journey together, linking the GA Client ID and the Pardot Prospect ID to the Salesforce Contact ID.
This is the heavy lifting of attribution, where you create a single source of truth for each customer journey across all touchpoints.
Finally, the visualization and modeling layer is handled by Looker Studio API.
The Looker Studio API allows you to programmatically manage and refresh your dashboards, pulling the cleaned and modeled data (now stored in a data warehouse like BigQuery – often part of the Google Cloud Platform solution) to create dynamic and shareable attribution reports.
This gives you total control over defining your attribution logic – be it first-touch, last-touch, linear, or even a custom data-driven model – allowing you to visualize which marketing efforts genuinely drive business value.
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