Attribution Is a Lie We Tell Ourselves

Attribution isn’t truth — it’s a clue. If you think your dashboard tells the full story of how someone became a lead, you’re kidding yourself. Most of what drives demand is invisible, untrackable, and written off as fluff. That’s not a reporting problem. It’s a mindset one.

And it’s a lie we really need to stop building our budgets around.

Ask any marketer what their C-suite wants from them, and nine times out of ten, the answer is some variation of:

“Prove your ROI.”

Seems fair, right? You’re spending money, you should be able to prove what it brings in. The problem is: we’ve all been sold on the illusion that marketing can be tracked with clean lines and hard numbers. It can’t.

And the obsession with attribution is making us dumber.

The dashboard is lying to you

You know what attribution usually means in practice? Giving full credit to the last thing a customer clicked before they converted. Sometimes, it’s the first. Or a made-up blend in between.

But let’s be real:

That email didn’t create demand. It just caught it.
That Google ad didn’t persuade them. It just showed up at the right time.
That form fill? It was probably the result of months of unseen influence.

According to Gartner, B2B buyers spend only 17% of their journey meeting with suppliers. The rest is invisible: talking to peers, reading content, listening to podcasts, stalking your team on LinkedIn.
https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey

Add to that: the average buyer consumes 13 pieces of content before reaching out. Most of those aren’t tracked, or are written off as “brand fluff.”
https://martech.org/b2b-buyers-consume-an-average-of-13-content-pieces-before-deciding-on-a-vendor/

So when a dashboard tells you that your webinar or ad campaign is the hero, it’s like reading the last chapter of a book and thinking you understand the plot.

Attribution isn’t useless — but it’s deeply incomplete

I want to be crystal clear here: I’m not saying you should ignore the data. You should absolutely track what you can. But you need to treat attribution like a clue, not a conclusion.

Because if you optimise based only on what’s measurable, you end up cutting the things that actually drive demand, but don’t show up in a tidy report.

It’s how you end up slashing:

Brand campaigns
Social engagement
Thought leadership
Creative work that earns attention, not just clicks

All because the attribution spreadsheet couldn’t connect the dots.

If you want clean ROI, marketing might not be the tool

If your exec team insists on assigning dollar-for-dollar returns to every campaign, you’re not doing marketing. You’re doing direct sales.

Marketing’s job isn’t to close deals. It’s to build memory, shift perception, earn attention, and create the conditions that make buying easier.

And the minute you reduce that to only what’s trackable, you lose the magic.

So what should we do instead?

Track what matters — but admit what’s missing. Stop pretending your CRM tells the whole story.
Measure direction, not just conversion. Are you seeing growth in branded search, time on site, direct traffic? Those are signals.
Budget like a portfolio, not a scoreboard. Not everything needs a direct return. Some things are just the cost of being remembered.

Final thought

Attribution is a tool, not a truth. Use it to inform your work, not to justify your existence.

Because if your boss still believes that leads come from the last click alone — maybe it’s not your dashboard that needs fixing.

About the Author

Manny Navarrete

An American currently residing in Australia with 17+ years of marketing and design experience specialising in digital platforms, social media, developing marketing strategies/campaigns and creative work. Highly technical, creative and analytically driven to develop and execute marketing plans with creativity and fresh thinking.