Marketing attribution is a LIE.

And this lie is killing all good marketing.

If I see one more marketer make a brand decision because “the data told us,” I’m going to lose my sh*t.

Somewhere along the line, marketing teams convinced themselves that “data” equals “understanding.” We swapped intuition, taste, and strategy for spreadsheet obsession. And now half the industry can’t ship a landing page without calling a committee meeting on UTM tags.

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Did it happen because product analytics got good and marketing got jealous? Or maybe growth marketing got too much shine and everyone else thought, “Yeah, we’ll just do that.”

Either way, we did this to ourselves.

And here’s the consequence: creativity died. Everything looks the same. Every headline is the same. Every landing page is the same. Every brand voice sounds the same. We’re optimizing tiny decimals while the actual soul of marketing is on life support.

Marketing teams nowadays be like:

Sure, everyone’s digital footprint exploded, and suddenly every company decided they’re a forensic scientist. Now every marketing move needs to be backed by a dashboard, a chart, and a 37-slide narrative about “what’s working.”

And it’s a mandate. (But even if there’s no data to point at, the decision dies in committee - that’s for another blog post…)

And look - some data is clean. Transactions? Clear as day. You can see who bought, when, and for how much. Great.

But trying to attribute how they chose you, what actually drove the decision, what nudged them at the right moment? Yeah. No. That’s human psychology that you won’t find in your dashboards.

Which means I’m sorry to say this out loud, but here we go:

Attribution is a lie.

There. I said it. Whew, that felt GOOD.

Last-click doesn’t tell the full story

So much of this comes down to how we’re doing attribution. The default for most companies is still last-click attribution - giving full credit to the traffic source right before a conversion. It’s simple. It’s easy to measure. And it’s an absolute hallucination of reality.

Last click only tells you which channels to performance optimize. It does not tell you where to invest in awareness, brand, trust, or actual demand creation. And when companies start reallocating resources based only on last click, they don’t just mis-spend budget - they quietly strangle their own pipeline.

But you know who loves last click? Google.

Because people use Google as a navigation bar. Which means they show up in last-click reports constantly. So the dashboard says “Google is our best channel!” and boom - the budget gets shoveled to Google. Yay for Google. Not yay for business.

Without actual top-of-funnel demand creation, those Google dollars are just bidding for attention you were going to get anyway.

(Note: This is going to start being a thing with ChatGPT soon, too, as people use LLMs to find the things they already use or know about, but just don’t want to navigate to.)

We have to remember: The human decision process is chaotic, unpredictable, and complex and cannot be reduced to a search query or a landing page performance.

HDYHAU alternative

So, if we can’t totally trust last-click, what’s the alternative? One great option is “How Did You Hear About Us” surveys. I love asking this question! Getting first-party data about where people are coming from is SO much more reliable.

Unfortunately, this isn’t foolproof either.

Part of this is just that human memory is pretty unreliable. At this point, I can’t even remember what happened to me last week, much less the specific progression of how I gradually became aware of a brand, 4 months ago.

Why does this matter?

Digital attribution benefits mainly performance channels: Search. Some paid social. Product loops. They feel magical because they give instant feedback. Money in, conversions out. Dopamine machine.

But here’s the big BUT: performance channels are mostly demand capture.

If you don’t have a separate strategy to generate demand, your performance channels will dry up. You can’t harvest what you didn’t plant.

So, what do we do?

If you’ve gotten this far, you get it. Attribution is messy. It’s not clean. There is no perfect view of “why someone converted.” So here’s how to actually handle it:

1. Use last-click attribution to understand where to optimize performance. That’s it. Do not use it to decide where to invest for demand generation.

2. Be careful with the fancy stuff. Yes, you can set up multi-touch, weighted crap. If your funnel has less than two real touchpoints, none of that matters. And weighted models are subjective anyway, which means you may just be data-confusing yourself into thinking you know something you don’t.

3. Always ask HDYHAU. Put “How did you hear about us?” in onboarding once a quarter. Turn it on for two weeks. Collect answers. Turn it back off. This gives you the story your buyer believes, which is usually the real one.

4. Media Mix Modeling (MMM) is the way. Although MMM works when you have a good amount of impressions/spend. If you’re running $5k/month, skip the modeling.

   1. Even Google knows MMM is where it’s at: open source project.

   2. There are out-of-the-box solutions too: Paramark is one I angel-invested in.

And please, do not forget this part: Creativity cannot be measured. There is art in this. Taste matters. Emotional resonance matters. Being memorable matters. If you try to find that in a dashboard, you will kill the very thing that makes marketing work in the first place.

Also: If you’re not sure whether you have Product-Market Fit or if you’re bootstrapping your company, you can skip a lot of this.

Bigger picture

All of this just shows that there’s no substitute for really understanding your customers – who they are and where they hang out. If you dig into your Four Fits (recently updated for the AI era!), you’ll realize that certain customers and models naturally work with specific channels.

Who does your ideal customer listen to? What do they care about? Is there a creator economy you can get into? Or is billboards a good strategy? Maybe it’s all about co-marketing?

I absolutely love what Maya Spivak shared about something they did at Segment:

“Within the constraints of our Series C budget and sub-10 person marketing team, at Segment we kicked off our first year of out-of-home advertising strategically by picking up placements hyper regionally. With a single placement averaging ~$15-20k a month depending on the location, you can’t afford to plaster entire cities with ads if you want to be spending prudently. But what you can do is figure out the headquarters addresses of your top 10 prospects and buy up the boards within their literal line of sight!

My favorite anecdotes are the ones that came in from the sales people who owned the target accounts. We had a large deal on the table with P&G, which is famously headquartered in Cincinnati, OH. We placed billboards at the on and off ramps to the exits for the office. …. Under Armour, which is in Baltimore MD, got a board within view of their waterfront offices. Retail-Me-Not, in Austin TX, same. We closed all of them.”

Genius! Not only does this help break through the noise, but it’s probably less expensive than chasing that same group around the various corners of the Internet, trying to capture their attention with spammy display ads.

It’s for the best

I get it. This isn’t a comfortable conversation to have. But if you’re honest with yourself, you’ve probably noticed how far-fetched some of the attribution out there is now. So the good news is: You’re not alone! Everyone is facing this.

When you think of it this way, you’ll start to see that the obsession with percentage-perfect attribution was always just a dream. When you let it go, your team can focus on the big growth levers that will truly make a difference.

→ Bonus resource: Want to figure out when you should invest in paid marketing? Read this

Edited by Jonathan Yagel - yay, we are working together again!