• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, 5 hours ago

I was recently sent an article by Elena Verna titled "Marketing attribution is a LIE.”  Verna works at start-up Lovable, which allows you to build apps and websites “by chatting to AI.” I do not know Verna nor Lovable, but from her LinkedIn profile and Substack posts, I’d say she has strong digital marketing credentials.

Her article has a great headline (I’m jealous). I also agree with it, although perhaps in a slightly different context. But yes, I also think marketing attribution is a lie we are complicit in telling and perpetuating.

Verna’s main complaint is that attribution software and many marketers’ obsession with last-click models give them a false sense of precision. It tells them where to “optimize” (usually bottom-of-funnel performance media) but blinds them to where they should “invest” (like in their actual brand).

But here’s the thing that nobody wants to admit: We don’t stick with the attribution lie because we’re stupid; we stick with it because it’s safe. Or at least it makes us feel that way.

Uncertainty terrifies executives. A CFO doesn’t want to hear, "We think this campaign is building trust." They want to hear, "We put one dollar in, we got three dollars out."

Attribution software allegedly delivers that security blanket. It turns the messy, chaotic, emotional reality of human purchasing behavior into a neat spreadsheet or customer journey. It allows a vice president of marketing to say, "Look, the green line went up."

I’ve sat in many meeting rooms where a brand or media manager was grilled on why they spent $50k on a podcast sponsorship that "didn't drive any conversions," only to see a traffic spike three weeks later. The attribution software said the podcast was a waste. The business results suggested otherwise.

Attribution software feels efficient (through an operational lens). But it’s often strategically suicidal.

In the pursuit of the “perfect” attribution, you inevitably shift budget to the things that are easiest to measure, but perhaps not the things that work best. You stop doing the hard work of demand creation and dump everything into demand capture.

Acknowledging this “lie” is easy. Fixing it requires guts. You have to retrain your organization to accept ambiguity. If you want to actually grow, rather than just efficiently manage your decline, here’s what you need to do.

Stop relying solely on Google Analytics or HubSpot to tell you where leads come from. Ask your customers "How did you hear about us?" And stop looking for one "source of truth." It doesn’t exist. Build a view that triangulates three things:

-- What the platform says. Review things like Facebook or Google ads manager.

-- What the backend says. Here you pull data in from, for instance, HubSpot or your owned data.

-- Add the aforementioned “What the customer says,” through surveys that ask “How did you hear about us?”

In the analysis of these three lies the truth (see what I did there?). Attribution isn’t dead or a pure lie, but it shouldn't be your sole driver. It’s perhaps your speedometer: It tells you how fast you’re going, but it doesn’t tell you if you’re on the right road.

So stop optimizing for the dashboard. Start optimizing for the business.