The attribution puzzle: How to crack marketing’s toughest challenge
Every marketer is under pressure to prove ROI. Budgets are scrutinised, KPIs are tied to performance, and leadership wants clear evidence of what’s working. That’s why attribution matters. It connects marketing activity to business outcomes by showing which channels and touchpoints actually influence a customer to take action.
Of course, attribution is rarely straightforward. For many marketers it feels like detective work in the dark. The evidence is scattered, the fingerprints are smudged, and piecing it all together is what makes the job so tricky. A recent survey found that 83% of marketing leaders view demonstrating ROI as their top priority, yet only 36% feel they can measure it accurately.
For B2B marketers, this problem is especially acute. With longer buying cycles and multiple decision makers involved, the path to conversion is complex and often hard to measure. Yet solving attribution, or at least improving it, is crucial for smarter investment and sustained growth.
Why attribution matters
Attribution is the bridge between marketing activity and business impact. Without it, budgets risk being spent on the loudest channels rather than the ones that actually influence buyers. A campaign might look like a success on the surface, but without clear attribution you can’t tell whether it genuinely created demand or simply captured interest already in motion.
Good attribution also shapes decision making. It shows which campaigns build awareness, which nurture consideration and which close deals – helping marketers align spend with their buyer journeys.
To make sense of this, marketers use attribution models to decide how credit is assigned. Single-touch methods like last-click are simple to report on but often distort reality by ignoring earlier interactions. More advanced models such as linear, time-decay, or data-driven spread credit more fairly. None are perfect, especially in today’s privacy-conscious, cross-channel world, but they offer a consistent framework for smarter investment decisions.
Why attribution is so challenging NOW
Several forces make attribution increasingly complex for B2B marketers in 2025. Picture opening your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, eager to see how new leads are finding you, only to be greeted by the catch‑all culprit, ‘Direct Traffic’. It’s like every prospect seems to have magically found you, leaving you thinking, ‘Did they stumble onto our site by accident?’
We know that’s not really the case, but proving where they came from can be tricky – and so important. Here are the three most common challenges modern marketers face:
Multi-touch journeys: Buyers rarely convert after one interaction. Decisions often stretch across months, with multiple campaigns and touchpoints. In B2B we typically favour multi-touch or data-driven models to give a fairer view of activities.
Cross-device behaviour: A prospect might discover your brand on mobile, revisit on a laptop, then finally convert at work. Without advanced tracking, these appear as separate users, hiding the real path.
Privacy changes: The decline of third-party cookies, operating system restrictions on mobile devices, and stricter regulations mean fewer signals and more blind spots. Attribution models often miss large chunks of the journey.
The result of these? Attribution data feels fragmented, inconsistent and incomplete, making it difficult to answer the critical question: where should we invest next?
Practical ways to improve attribution
The goal isn’t to achieve perfect attribution, that’s pretty much impossible. Instead, the aim is to reduce blind spots and build a clearer picture of what’s working. Here are four practical steps every marketing team can take:
- Use consistent UTM tagging. Adding Urchin Tracking Modules (UTMs, simple tags on the end of URLs) ensures every click is tied back to a campaign. Without them, cross-channel reporting quickly becomes messy and unreliable. A consistent structure makes trends easier to spot and comparisons more meaningful.
- Connect your CRM with ad platforms. Linking Salesforce, HubSpot or similar tools to ad platforms helps track leads and revenue back to campaigns. It also lets platforms optimise towards the touchpoints that actually drive results, rather than just clicks or impressions.
- Capture self-reported attribution. Asking “How did you hear about us?” on forms or in onboarding can surface channels that digital tracking misses, like podcasts, events or word of mouth. It’s a simple way to fill in blind spots and validate your analytics.
- Run controlled tests. Pausing campaigns in certain markets or audiences shows whether a channel is driving incremental demand or just capturing conversions that would have happened anyway. While it requires short-term sacrifice, it gives hard evidence of what really works.
Solving the puzzle
Even with these steps, attribution can still feel like a puzzle with missing pieces. The reality is that no single model gives the full picture, which is why combining practical habits with advanced tools is so important.
Used alongside disciplined tagging and reporting, they help fill the gaps, uncover blind spots, and give a more confident view of what’s working. The payoff is clearer budget decisions, stronger sales alignment, and the ability to double down on the channels that actually drive growth.
Curious about how attribution could work harder for your brand? At Archetype, we’ve helped clients simplify measurement and make more confident decisions. Get in touch and see how we can help you do the same.
