The $100 Million Attribution Problem Nobody Talks About
I’ve watched countless marketing teams make the same expensive mistake: investing months and significant budgets into multi-touch attribution systems that promise clarity but deliver confusion.
Multi-touch attribution (MTA) isn’t just underperforming in 2025—it’s actively misleading marketing teams into poor decisions. Here’s why, and more importantly, what successful companies are doing instead.
The Uncomfortable Truth About MTA in 2025
Multi-touch attribution is a waste of time and money. This isn’t a controversial statement anymore. Yet brands continue falling into the MTA trap, seduced by the promise of perfect customer journey visibility.
I know of many companies that spend months building a comprehensive MTA system. After implementation, their model will show only 10% of conversions involved multiple touchpoints—which wasn’t true, but was all their attribution system could see.
The reality? Their sophisticated MTA setups are effectively delivering the same results as last-click attribution. No better insights. No better decisions. No added value.
Why MTA Falls Short When It Matters Most
The Data Observability Crisis
Modern customer journeys span multiple devices, browsers, and platforms. Imagine trying to solve a murder mystery, but each clue is locked in a different room. That’s what happens when Google Ads, Facebook, and your email platform each hoard their own metrics.
A typical user sees a Facebook ad on their smartphone, clicks on it, then enters the website URL directly into their laptop address bar days later. All credit goes to the “direct” visit. What about the initial Facebook ad that probably had the greatest impact?
The Privacy Paradox
With iOS 17, GDPR, and increasing privacy restrictions, multi-touch attribution often fails to capture the full customer journey. We’re chasing perfect measurement in an increasingly unmeasurable world.
The Trust Crisis
The data backs up what I see in the field: 64% of B2B marketing leaders don’t trust their organization’s marketing measurement for decision-making, according to Forrester’s 2024 survey of nearly 900 global B2B executives. Only 29% consider themselves “very successful” at using attribution, while 71% need to improve their attribution programs to make better decisions.
The Complexity Trap
Marketing analysts spend more time aggregating attribution data than deriving meaningful insights from it. Teams become so focused on measurement perfection that they miss optimization opportunities.
What Winning Companies Do Instead
I’ve found that top performers abandon attribution perfection for something far more powerful: behavioral intelligence.
Instead of asking “which touchpoint gets credit?” they ask “which prospects are most likely to buy, and when?”
Customer Intelligence Over Attribution
Rather than tracking every touchpoint, successful companies focus on engagement velocity. They score prospects based on behavioral intensity—not attribution complexity. Email opens within 5 minutes signal different intent than opens hours later. Multiple pricing page visits in one week indicate purchase readiness.
Revenue-First Measurement
The best-performing companies track just 5 KPIs that directly impact business decisions: Marketing-Attributed Revenue percentage, Customer Acquisition Cost by channel, LTV:CAC ratio, MQL to SQL conversion rate, and Marketing ROI by activity.
Predictive Focus
Use AI to predict future behavior instead of perfectly tracking past behavior. Companies using predictive customer intelligence see higher marketing ROI than competitors obsessed with attribution accuracy.
The Strategic Shift That Changes Everything
The companies winning in 2025 have made a fundamental shift from retrospective attribution to prospective intelligence. They’ve stopped asking “what happened?” and started asking “what’s going to happen?”
This isn’t about having better attribution models—it’s about building better customer intelligence systems that predict and influence behavior more effectively than competitors.
The Bottom Line
Perfect attribution is a myth that distracts from what actually drives results: understanding customer behavior patterns and responding intelligently.
While competitors waste resources chasing attribution perfection, market leaders are building predictive customer intelligence systems that actually improve marketing ROI.
Stop measuring the past. Start predicting the future
Marissa Homere 