Multi touch attribution is astrology for people who went to business school

Every B2B company has a dashboard somewhere that hands out credit for a deal like a group project grade. The LinkedIn ad gets some. The webinar gets some. Three emails and a Google search split the rest. First touch usually gets a big chunk, last touch gets a big chunk, and the middle touches fight over whatever’s left. Someone built the formula in a spreadsheet once, it got turned into a tool, and now the output shows up in a slide with more confidence than the underlying math deserves.

Pick a model, get a different answer

Linear, time decay, U shaped, W shaped, algorithmic. Run the same set of deals through each one and you’ll get a different story about what mattered every time. A model that gives a different answer depending on which model you picked is just a formula someone chose, dressed up like something that was observed.

Most deals close because a rep talked to the right person while the budget happened to exist. The dozen touchpoints before that were mostly background noise, and plenty of them would have happened whether the campaign ran or not. Marketing teams know this. It just doesn’t fit on a slide, so the dashboard fills in for the honest version.

What the dashboard is really doing

It gives marketing a number to defend the budget with next quarter. It lets everyone avoid saying the true thing out loud, which is usually something like “we tried a bunch of stuff and some of it probably helped.” That sentence is accurate and it doesn’t hold up in a board meeting, so a pie chart stands in for it instead.

The tell

If your attribution report can tell you, with a straight face, that a footer link in a newsletter earned 8% credit on a $200,000 deal, ask the rep who closed it what mattered. They’ll answer in one sentence, and there won’t be a percentage in it.