Insights
Attribution, for businesses that close offline.
What we have learned reconciling closed sales against lead sources — the methods, the failure modes, and the numbers that survive a finance review.
Blended ROAS is a comfort blanket with a number on it
Total revenue divided by total spend feels like the honest, platform-agnostic metric. It is also incapable of telling you which channel to cut, hides the performance of everything inside it, and improves when you stop spending on the things that grow you.
Three vendors, one sale, and everybody has a screenshot
Add up what your agencies and platforms claim and you have sold the same thing several times over. Nobody is lying. Here is why double counting is structural, how to run the reconciliation meeting, and what to change in the contracts so it stops recurring.
Multi-touch attribution and marketing mix modeling are answering different questions
One tracks individuals and cannot see causation. The other infers causation and cannot see individuals. Vendors sell them as competitors, which is convenient for whoever is selling. Here is what each can and cannot tell you, and what a mid-market business should do instead of buying either.
Send closed revenue back to the ad platforms, carefully
Offline conversion imports let Google and Meta optimize toward money instead of form fills. They also hand a platform your customer list and let it mark its own homework. Here is how to do it without either mistake.
When the sale closes fourteen months after the click
Every attribution tool is built for businesses where the inquiry and the purchase happen in the same quarter. If yours does not, almost every default is wrong: the date ranges, the reporting cadence, the optimization signal and the patience of everyone involved.
Attribution across forty locations, where the averages lie to you
A multi-location business that reports one national attribution number is hiding its most important finding. The same campaign performs differently in every market, and the aggregate is an average of things that should never have been averaged.
Marketing and finance are using the word revenue to mean different things
Before you can argue about attribution you have to agree what a sale is, when it happened, and how much it was worth. Most businesses have never had that conversation, which is why the marketing number and the finance number never match and everyone assumes somebody is wrong.
How to put marketing revenue in front of a board without losing the room
Boards do not distrust marketing numbers because they are bad at maths. They distrust them because the numbers keep changing, do not tie to the accounts, and arrive with no statement of what was not measured. All three are fixable in one page.
Proving ROI to a client who has decided not to believe you
Every agency eventually meets the client whose sales director says the leads are rubbish. More dashboards will not fix it. What fixes it is measuring on the client's own revenue data — which is the one thing most agencies are structurally reluctant to ask for.
Twenty questions to ask an attribution vendor, and the answers that should worry you
Attribution demos are unusually easy to pass, because the product is a number and any number looks convincing on a slide. These are the questions that separate a system that measures from one that produces confident output — including the ones we would rather you did not ask us.
How long should you keep customer data for attribution?
Attribution needs history and privacy law needs forgetting, and those two facts are in direct tension. A practical retention policy for marketing data: what to keep, what to aggregate, what to delete, and how to prove you did.
Every listing site sold you the same car three times
A dealer group's marketing reports add up to more vehicles than the group sold. Third-party marketplaces, OEM co-op campaigns and your own paid search all claim the same buyer, and the only file that counts each sale once is the one in your DMS.
Stop guessing which ads pay off.
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