Moving Beyond Marketing Attribution

By David Ronald  

For years, marketing attribution was seen as the holy grail of accountability.  

If you could trace every lead, click, or conversion back to a source, you had proof that your marketing worked. 

But in today’s complex, non-linear buying environment, that logic no longer holds up. The customer journey isn’t a straight line – it’s a web of interactions, influences, and conversations that defy simple credit assignment.  

The problem isn’t that attribution is bad, it’s that it’s incomplete.  

When marketers rely solely on attribution models, spanning last-touch, first-touch, or even multi-touch, they’re often measuring what’s easiest to see, not what’s most important.  

Brand trust, peer recommendations, word of mouth, and community influence all play huge roles in shaping purchase decisions, but they rarely show up in a CRM report.  

(You may also be interested in reading this post Measuring Attribution in Multi-channel Campaigns.)

The Trust Gap

This gap between what’s measurable and what’s meaningful is one reason many marketing leaders struggle to earn full executive trust.  

When the numbers tell only part of the story, the story itself loses credibility. Executives don’t just want to know which channel “got credit” – they want to understand how marketing drives business outcomes: revenue growth, customer lifetime value, and margin impact.  

Winning that trust requires reframing the conversation. Instead of focusing on attribution as the answer, smart marketing leaders are expanding their measurement lens to tell a more holistic story, one that mirrors how customers actually behave.

From Attribution to Understanding

The first step is to document the real customer journey.  

That means going beyond funnel stages and pipeline reports to map out how people discover, evaluate, and choose your brand. Conversations in Slack communities, peer reviews, YouTube demos, and podcasts often shape opinions long before a buyer ever fills out a form.  

Once you see the full picture, attribution becomes just one data point among many, part of a richer, more accurate understanding of influence and intent.  

This shift requires collaboration across departments, because customer journeys don’t respect org charts.

Speak the Language of the Business

To build executive confidence, marketers also need to translate their insights into the metrics that matter at the top.  

Instead of talking about “impressions” or “marketing-sourced pipeline,” connect the dots to financial and strategic outcomes – how marketing initiatives accelerate deal velocity, expand customer value, or reduce acquisition costs.  

Advanced modeling techniques such as marketing mix modeling, incrementality testing, and causal inference can help show the broader economic contribution of marketing.  

But even more powerful than the math is the mindset – positioning marketing as a disciplined, data-driven partner in enterprise growth.

Conclusion

Moving beyond attribution should be framed as an evolution, and not as an admission of failure.  

The way customers buy has changed – and so the way we measure must evolve with it.  

When marketers embrace this broader, more connected approach to measurement, they earn more than credit…  

They earn trust.  

And in today’s data-saturated, skepticism-rich world, that trust is the most valuable metric of all.  

Thanks for reading – I hope you found this blog post useful. 

Are you interested in discussing how to improve your attribution model? If so, let’s have a conversation. My email address is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.