NV5 Geospatial
Rebuilding attribution for a 127-day B2B sales cycle to reveal over $14M in digitally influenced revenue and a 68.5x assisted ROAS—overturning the narrative that digital marketing wasn't working.
Industry
Geospatial Engineering
Avg Sales Cycle
127 Days
Influenced Revenue
$14M+
Assisted ROAS
68.5x
The Data Said Digital Wasn't Working.
NV5 Geospatial is a division of NV5 Global (NYSE: NVEE), a publicly traded infrastructure and technology firm. The geospatial division sells high-ticket services to enterprise clients and government agencies, with buying cycles that frequently stretch four months or more and involve multiple stakeholders.
Traditional attribution was failing. HubSpot showed only a handful of marketing-sourced contacts and deals in 2025, suggesting that campaigns on Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn were barely moving the needle despite significant spend. The data implied digital marketing was underperforming.
But sales leaders knew deals were closing. They just couldn't tie them back to specific channels, campaigns, or touchpoints. The disconnect was structural, not strategic. Standard attribution models were fundamentally incompatible with how NV5's buyers actually behave.
The Attribution Disconnect
Marketing-Sourced Deals
Paid Channel Revenue
Implied Verdict
Influenced Revenue
Deals Influenced
Assisted ROAS
The attribution system was broken, not the marketing
Why Standard Attribution Failed
Three structural flaws made native tracking fundamentally incompatible with how enterprise geospatial buyers actually purchase. The data was technically accurate—the model was wrong.
The Wrong Person Gets Credit
In B2B with multiple stakeholders, the person who clicks an ad is often not the one who submits a form. UTM-based "Original Source" fields tracked individuals, not organizational buying behavior.
Sales Bypassed Tracked Forms
Business development worked from LeadFeeder logo alerts—company-level website visit notifications. Sales reached out directly, bypassing tracked forms entirely. Real revenue, zero attribution trail.
Fragmented Contact Data
Multiple contacts from the same company attached to a single deal, but only some carried marketing source data. Contact-level reports were unusable for serious attribution analysis.
Result: Standard reporting showed almost no qualified leads or revenue from key paid channels. This contradicted pipeline reality—but the data was technically accurate given the tracking model's limitations.
The System Mediaura Built
A four-layer attribution engine that reframed measurement around companies and deals instead of individual form fills—connecting unstructured CRM data to real revenue.
Company-Level Attribution Model
Reframed attribution around companies and deals rather than individual form fills. Used LeadFeeder data as the company-level "source of truth" for first touch, recognizing that organizational engagement—not individual clicks—is what matters in enterprise sales.
Custom Attribution Engineering
Custom script continuously scanned HubSpot business notes populated by LeadFeeder integration, detecting ad-related keywords and UTM patterns. Companies with ad interactions were automatically added to dynamic lists for revenue reporting—turning unstructured text data into actionable marketing intelligence.
Multi-Touch Journey Reconstruction
Cross-referenced LeadFeeder exports with HubSpot exports by CRM ID, company name, and domain. Created custom HubSpot properties for First Touch (LeadFeeder), First Touch (HubSpot), and Most Recent Touch. Multi-select checkboxes logged whether each contact was influenced by Google, Bing, or LinkedIn—updated automatically with paid channels prioritized over organic.
Assisted Revenue Attribution
Final layer connecting attribution to actual revenue. Created reports filtering closed-won deals by dynamic company lists, tagging every deal whose associated company had been influenced by paid media—even when no individual contact carried a clean UTM.
Marketing's True Revenue Impact
When attribution was rebuilt around companies and deals instead of individual contacts, a completely different picture of marketing's impact emerged.
Influenced Revenue
270 deals in 2025 touched by paid media
Assisted ROAS
On ~$205K total media spend
First-Touch Revenue
13.69x ROAS across 41 deals
Unique Logos Engaged
Companies reached via paid and organic
The gap between $3.19M (first-touch) and $14M (assisted) quantified exactly how much revenue standard attribution was missing—over $10.8M in invisible marketing influence.
Sales Cycle Intelligence
Days
Average sales cycle mapped
ROAS
Fast-moving opportunities (0–30 days)
ROAS
Long-cycle deals (181+ days)
New Logo Acquisition by Channel
3,197 unique company logos engaged across all channels
How This Changed NV5's Decisions
Budget Protection & Reallocation
Justified maintaining and increasing budgets on channels responsible for new logo acquisition. Without company-level attribution, these channels would have appeared to generate near-zero ROI.
Funnel-Stage Campaign Design
Campaigns redesigned for awareness, consideration, and late-stage deal support—each stage with its own success metrics aligned to the 127-day buying cycle rather than forcing immediate conversion goals.
Marketing-Sales Alignment
Company-level attribution enabled more informed outreach and better forecasting. Sales could see which companies had been touched by marketing before making contact, creating a shared view of pipeline reality.
Attribution Maturity Roadmap
A crawl-walk-run progression: from trusting native conversions (past), to custom company-level attribution (present), to deepening multi-touch with upgraded HubSpot capabilities (next).
"Mediaura has been a strong partner for NV5 Geospatial's digital media strategy and implementation. As a company with a diverse set of solution lines and target segments, Mediaura's methodology and insights helped us hone in and focus our messaging, reach, and budget, which not only saved us time, money, and energy but also increased our brand and solution awareness and engagement three-fold."
Luke Blackburn
NV5
Is Your Attribution Missing the Full Picture?
If your sales cycle is longer than 30 days and involves multiple stakeholders, standard attribution is probably understating marketing's true impact on revenue.
Mediaura can help you find out what your current tracking is missing—and build an attribution system that reflects how your buyers actually buy.