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Attribution Sees Only 20% of the Buyer Journey. Now What?

Attribution Sees Only 20% of the Buyer Journey. Now What?

28th Edition: Through the Funnel (Marketing News & Jobs)

MarketingHQ
December 02, 2025

News From MHQ to You 📰

For the last decade, companies made decisions using attribution models that worked “well enough” on paper.

Paid Search = X pipeline
Events = Y leads
Social = Z influence

It all looked clean in dashboards, clean in spreadsheets, and clean enough to defend budgets.

But the system broke, not because attribution got less accurate, but because it got less relevant.

This doesn’t mean we stop measuring channels. It means we stop pretending channel attribution represents the full buyer journey.

Specific channel and in-platform attribution comforts executives because it turns uncertainty into math. It may only capture 20% of reality, but that 20% is clean, exportable, board-friendly, and easy to build budgets around.

The problem is the other 80%.
It lives in communities, dark social, group chats, shared docs, internal Slack threads, podcasts, and word-of-mouth moments that avoid traditional attribution methods. But that’s where modern buying actually happens, and it’s the part leaders feel least in control of.

Acknowledging this doesn’t weaken marketing. It strengthens it. It forces a shift from tracking everything perfectly to understanding buyers deeply (what they care about, and where and how they self-educate) which is where real growth comes from.

Why Attribution No Longer Reflects Reality

Three seismic shifts have changed buying behavior forever:

1. Buyers stopped following linear journeys.

In B2B SaaS, they move between 22–40 touchpoints before talking to Sales.
Not in a straight line…in loops.
Across channels you don’t own and can’t track.

2. Tracking infrastructure collapsed.

Cookies. Privacy laws. Dark social. Device shifts.
Your tools now see maybe 20% of the real journey.

3. Influence moved off-platform.

The most important moments happen in places with no pixels:

Slack groups
Private DMs
Texts with peers
Community AMAs
Podcasts
Zoom calls

You can’t attribute the conversations that actually create trust.

Attribution isn’t less accurate, it’s just less relevant.
It still measures what it can see. The problem is that it sees far less than it used to.

Yet CEOs and boards still expect channel-level attribution as if it’s 2018.
That puts modern marketing leaders in a bind.

What a Real Buyer Journey Looks Like

vs. what your CRM actually sees

Here’s a real 10-step journey, identical to what happens in B2B SaaS every day:

Sees your LinkedIn post passively
No like. No click.
CRM sees: nothing
Hears your brand mentioned on a podcast
CRM sees: nothing
Asks in a Slack community: “Thoughts on Vendor X?”
Peers validate you.
CRM sees: nothing
Googles your brand and visits the site with tracking off
CRM sees: “Direct” = (we don’t know)
Third-party research: G2, Reddit, YouTube, LLMs, competitors sites.
CRM sees: nothing
Internal meeting
“Oh yeah, I’ve seen their stuff.”
CRM sees: nothing
Returns to your website with tracking accepted
CRM sees: Organic Search
SDR sends outbound email
They respond because trust already exists.
CRM sees: Outbound Sourced
Sees a customer story on LinkedIn
CRM sees: nothing
Books a demo
CRM sees: Deal Created = Outbound

What attribution reports: Outbound sourced the deal.
What actually happened: A 10-touch loop where 8/10 were invisible.

Multiply this by 1,000 buyers and attribution becomes a mirage.

The Cost of Clinging to Broken Attribution

When CEOs and boards rely on incomplete data:

1. Influence channels get defunded.

Podcasts, social, community…all look like “brand fluff.”

2. Capture channels get over-credited.

Paid search, outbound, forms capture demand they didn’t create.

3. Marketing gets held to math that can’t work.

You can’t “prove ROI by channel” when tools see 20% of the journey.

Attribution reports where a buyer converted, not what created the desire to buy.

Why “Invest More in Brand” Falls Flat

Executives don’t respond to vague requests for “more brand.” To them, brand sounds soft, fluffy, and unmeasurable, something that burns cash without a clear ROI. And honestly, they’re right to push back if all they hear is “brand is important.”

What changes the conversation isn’t asking for more brand budget; it’s reframing the discussion around qualitative attribution, buyer-reported intent, and observable patterns in how deals actually start.

When you show CEOs how influence shows up in buyer behavior, brand stops looking like a creative expense and starts looking like a revenue engine hiding outside the dashboard.

How to Talk to Your CEO About This

You win this discussion with clarity, not complaints.

“Attribution only captures the visible 20%.”
Walk them through the 10-step journey.
“Buyers gain interest in places we can’t track.”
Slack. Podcasts. Communities. Peers.
“We optimize for revenue, not credit.”
Attribution = who gets credit
Revenue = what actually worked
—And no, this isn’t last-touch.
It’s truth-touch: using the full pattern of signals + buyer-reported intent to understand where demand really began.
“If we optimize for what’s trackable, we underinvest in what works.”
This one lands every time.
“We need to measure the GTM engine, not channels.”
This reframes the whole conversation.

Most companies talk about dark social, few measure it.

What it is:

A lightweight way to capture the untrackable moments when buyers admit how they truly heard about you: Slack channels, DMs, podcasts, LinkedIn posts, screenshots, peer recommendations, etc.

How to implement (with examples):

Add a required open-text field on high-intent forms:
“How did you FIRST hear about us?”
Real answers: “Podcast,” “Slack group,” “LinkedIn,” “Coworker sent your guide.”
Train SDRs/AEs to ask on every inbound call:
“What first put us on your radar?”
Log everything in a shared CRM field or spreadsheet:
Patterns emerge fast.

Why it works:

It gives you directional truth about where intent actually starts, the part attribution will never see.

What CMOs Should Do in the Next 60 Days

Map your real buyer journey.
Compare it to CRM attribution.
Separate influence vs. capture channels (later separate budgets).
Shift reporting to MER, CAC Payback, Velocity, Win Rates.
Reset expectations with your board before budget season.

The New Role of Marketing

Marketing isn’t a lead factory anymore.
It’s the engine that:

Builds pre-pipeline trust
Creates market education
Influences dark social
Shapes narrative
Aligns GTM teams around efficiency

Companies that win in 2026 won’t be the ones with the cleanest dashboards,
they’ll be the ones with the most aligned, efficient GTM engines.

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