💡 The short of it
Attribution feels like safety – every pound traced, every lead sourced, and your budget defended for another quarter. But that tidy number ignores the dark research, the Teams links, the coffee shop recommendations. Chris Bagnall argues our addiction to clean measurement is quietly capping growth, pulling budget towards this week’s buyers while brand and demand creation get the scraps. The braver question is that’s actually contributing to growth.
“You’re in a QBR, presenting results. You bring up the attribution dashboard. Every pound accounted for, every lead traced back to a source. Heads nod, the budget survives another quarter, you breathe a sigh of relief. You understand that it’s mostly fiction built to appease those in charge of the purse strings. But it’s the only way you know to defend your budget. ‘Another one down,’ you think to yourself.”
I feel like the more senior among you can imagine the scene. But common as it is, it touches on a very important aspect of the modern B2B marketing blueprint I feel we all need to address. Attribution has become the comfort blanket we, as B2B marketers, need to step away from.
We cling to it because it hands us a number we can defend. A meeting we can get through. What it doesn’t shed light on, however, is the more than 80% of the buyer journey that dashboards fail to account for. And that’s the rub – the things that move the business aren’t usually the things you can cleanly measure. That feeling of certainty a dashboard gives you is what stands between you and growth.
What the blanket is hiding from you
Doing just enough to please the C-suite may be enough to earn you another quarter, but it certainly won’t win you any more budget. If you want that, zoom out from what needs to be delivered day-to-day and think more about how your buyers weigh up a decision.
The true extent of the buyer journey: a single considered purchase now runs through a 6-10 person buying group, with Forrester finding there could be up to 13 decision-influencers at the minimum to address.
Most of the B2B buying journey happens in the dark: the months of self-directed research, the link dropped into a Teams channel, the recommendation traded over a coffee. They all happen well out of the reach of your tracking.
You’re fighting for an even slimmer fraction of your audience’s attention: buyers increasingly start a purchase inside an AI Overview rather than on your site, meaning you and your competitors are fighting for a measly 17% of your buyers’ time.
They’re all areas that influence the final decision. And they’re all areas that are hard – or impossible – to track. With last-click (or an opaque ‘data-driven’ model no one can crack) becoming the only attribution models left on Google Analytics, B2B marketers are making decisions based on a very narrow piece of the whole picture.
Safety blanket, yes. Growth engine? Not so much.
The cost of measuring the wrong thing
The challenge isn’t that the dashboard is inaccurate, it’s that it’s persuasive. A tidy number pulls budget towards the handful of people ready to buy this week, while brand, community, and creator work (the things that generate future demand) get whatever’s left over. That’s not a reporting problem – it’s one to do with growth.
What can’t be tracked also greatly contributes to a business’ performance: strong B2B brands outperform weak ones by around 20%, carrying a roughly 65% premium on forward earnings multiples. You can’t put a number on gut feeling, but you can on ensuring your audience has the best impression possible.
Gong is a great example within our industry. In 2019, they coined ‘revenue intelligence’ as a category, and then owned it. They have a loud, founder-led presence on LinkedIn, a proper community built around it, and most importantly, a point of view. They’re all channels a last-click model would have filed under ‘direct’ and that’d be it. No further budget for those activities. And no chance they become the startup-to-hundreds-of-millions-in-ARR-business they are today.
The honest bit
I’ve touched on this throughout the piece, but it’s worth reiterating: Measurement and attribution aren’t useless, but they are only a pinhole view into how a decision comes to be.
The problem with the current approach lies in single-source, last-click certainty – not measurement itself. Better B2B attribution platforms (such as Dreamdata) model the whole account journey far more honestly than Google Analytics or last click ever could.
Now, nothing captures everything. But you can triangulate. Pair better equipped platforms with incrementality and holdout tests, marketing mix modelling, brand tracking, and self-reported attribution. Each is flawed alone, but they beat one tidy number together. That way you build benchmarks from your own data, rather than relying on general, industry-wide trends.
The braver KPI
The real question is simpler, and a good deal more uncomfortable than that slide in a QBR. Is the business growing? Are the right accounts turning up already warm?
Certainty is a report where every pound is accounted for. Growth is backing the work you can’t trace.
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This piece was first published on The Drum, and was written with support from Transmission’s Digital Director, David Gyertson.
