How ClickUp grew from $4M to $150M with Attribution as their foundation for marketing & growth

Challenge

Scaling marketing spend efficiently required deeper customer data

Back in 2019, Clickup was a rapidly growing bootstrapped company, ClickUp needed to establish greater market share in a competitive space. Their freemium, product-led growth (PLG) model meant tracking numerous touchpoints across the customer journey — from website visits and content engagement to product signups, account activation, and expansion.

However, basic UTM tracking wasn’t scalable for ClickUp’s needs — they had millions of monthly visitors and lots of website pages, and “last touch” from UTMs didn’t tell the whole story. UTMs are yes, time-consuming to create, though they fail mostly to account for whether a user comes to the site after engaging with one, or multiple, others sources.

Traditional multi-touch attribution solutions weren’t viable though either. They:

• Didn’t give enough detail down to the user or account level for audit ability, relying or sitting on top of Google Analytics (GA), ad platform data, or similar.
• Required heavy investment and a large data team to build.

Both situations made it nearly impossible to track true customer acquisition costs / ROAS while scaling a marketing and growth in a short period.

Additionally, Aaron Cort, ClickUp’s Head of Marketing at the time, needed to prove to leadership that increasing investments was the right call— whether in performance marketing, affiliate partnerships, blog content, or otherwise — and would prove efficient from a CAC / CAC Payback for paid and resource spend perspective.

To create a unified funnel with insights on marketing end-to-end, they needed more data, specifically:

• Deeper visibility on a per-person level to understand full-funnel conversion rates
• Unbiased attribution to avoid overvaluing individual platforms’ contributions
• Longer attribution windows to accommodate years-long customer journeys

ClickUp could have built comprehensive attribution in-house from the get-go, but they estimated it would cost over $500,000 to build and maintain it effectively (technology and people).

So, Aaron began looking for a cost-effective platform that would enable ClickUp to scale ad spend, partnerships, content development and more, while providing a deeper understanding of each marketing channel’s touchpoint’s impact. When he learned that Attribution has the unique ability to track individual user journeys from the first website visit, he knew it was the right fit.

“My job was to figure out how to scale all of our programs. We were already doing well but needed to grow even faster considering our market/competition.”

Aaron Cort

First Head of Marketing @ClickUp

Solution

Implementing Attribution revealed granular, full-funnel marketing insights

The Attribution platform assigns each of ClickUp’s site visitors a unique ID and automatically connects that data to their customer profile. It centralizes data from all integrated platforms — from Google Ads to Meta to HubSpot — so the ClickUp team knows the true impact of their marketing efforts.

This gives ClickUp access to:

Full-funnel, omnichannel tracking: With Attribution, ClickUp maps the user journey end-to-end and tracks user behavior across all marketing channels, including paid, organic, and referral sources. ClickUp also gets conversion insights at each stage of the funnel, revealing which channels are most effective at each stage of the journey.

Complete user journey tracking: The Attribution platform tracks every visit, click, and dollar spent at the user and account level — from anonymous first touch through customer conversion. By organizing this data into clear marketing channels and ROI sources, Attribution helps ClickUp measure true CAC and LTV. “None of the other products we evaluated gave us that level of visibility,” Aaron said.

Paid marketing optimization: Using Attribution’s precise, user-level tracking, ClickUp can monitor real-time CAC and payback across all paid channels. This granular data helps them efficiently distribute ad spend and effectively justify increased budgets to company leadership based on true ROAS.

Organic marketing insights: Because Attribution automatically identifies and tags every touchpoint throughout a user’s lifecycle, it’s simple to measure traditionally hard-to-track channels. This helps ClickUp understand how their organic efforts, like social and referral, contribute to customer acquisition and LTV.

Armed with these comprehensive insights, the team successfully scaled ad spend over the next three years with no significant uptick in CAC. What’s more, the platform’s flexible data structure enables ClickUp to customize their attribution models and integrate with their data warehouse. This flexibility means the team can run deeper analyses by combining Attribution’s data with other business metrics, creating a holistic view of marketing performance.

“When you’re ramping from $0 to millions of dollars a month on acquisition — with hundreds of millions of people coming to your website — you need to make decisions very quickly and accurately. Attribution ensures we see what’s working faster and make smarter decisions about where to invest.”

Aaron Cort

First Head of Marketing @ClickUp

Results

Scaling from $4M to $150M ARR using data-driven marketing decisions

Since implementing Attribution, ClickUp has demystified how each touchpoint contributes to conversions. Using these insights, the team optimized their marketing investments during a critical scaling period, maximizing the ROI on every marketing dollar.

With Attribution, ClickUp achieved:

• $4M to $150M ARR growth in 3 years
• $0 to $4M monthly ad spend in 14 months
• ~$500k saved vs. building an attribution model in-house
• 9-month advertising payback period (compared to 12-month industry standard)

Today, ClickUp is valued at $4B, establishing themselves as a market leader in only three years. And Aaron credits Attribution as the engine that helped drive their growth from bootstrapped startup to $150M ARR.