Attribution Is a Lie. It Always Was.

Marketing attribution models are built on a beautiful lie: that customer journeys are linear, trackable, and attributable to specific touchpoints.

AI isn't destroying attribution—it's just making it obvious how broken it always was.

The Pretty Lie of Attribution

Multi-touch attribution promised to solve marketing's oldest problem: proving ROI. Finally, we could track every touchpoint and assign credit scientifically.

Except customer journeys aren't scientific. They're messy, emotional, and increasingly invisible to our tracking systems.

The attribution fairy tale:
User sees Facebook ad → clicks → reads blog post → downloads whitepaper → gets email sequence → converts

The actual customer journey:
Sees Facebook ad while distracted → mentions problem to colleague three weeks later → colleague recommends your competitor → Googles alternatives → finds your comparison page → converts six months later after their budget gets approved

We're measuring the 20% of the customer journey we can track and pretending it represents the 100% we can't see.

Why Attribution Is Getting Worse

Every trend in digital marketing is making attribution less reliable:

Privacy regulations: GDPR, CCPA, and iOS changes killed third-party tracking
Ad blockers: 42% of users block tracking scripts
Cross-device behavior: Research on phone, purchase on laptop
Long sales cycles: B2B deals take 6-18 months with dozens of touchpoints
Dark social: Direct messages, private Slack channels, word-of-mouth

AI is accelerating this by changing how people discover and evaluate solutions.

The AI Attribution Apocalypse

AI search tools are the final nail in attribution's coffin:

Perplexity searches: Zero click-through to track
ChatGPT recommendations: No referrer data
AI research assistants: Synthesize information from dozens of sources
Internal AI tools: Employees use AI to research vendors without leaving traceable digital footprints

The customer journey increasingly happens inside AI black boxes that we'll never be able to track.

The Data Theater Problem

Most attribution reports are elaborate data theater. They assign mathematical precision to fundamentally unmeasurable phenomena.

"This Facebook ad drove 23% of conversions with a 3.2x ROAS."

Based on what? The 15% of touchpoints you could track? The users who didn't block tracking? The conversions that happened on the same device?

We're measuring marketing's shadow and pretending it's marketing.

What Actually Works

If traditional attribution is dead, what should you measure instead?

1. Directional Indicators
Stop trying to measure exactly what drove what. Look for directional correlation between activities and outcomes.

2. Incrementality Testing
A/B test entire marketing channels. Turn off Facebook ads for a test market and measure the total impact.

3. Brand Lift Studies
Survey your customers. "How did you first hear about us?" is more accurate than attribution models.

4. Leading Indicators
Track metrics that predict revenue but aren't dependent on attribution: brand search volume, direct traffic, email engagement.

5. Market Mix Modeling
Statistical analysis that looks at the relationship between marketing spend and business outcomes at the aggregate level.

The New Measurement Reality

The companies winning at marketing measurement in 2024 have accepted a few hard truths:

Most of the customer journey is unmeasurable. That's fine. Focus on the parts you can influence.

Attribution models are directionally useful but numerically meaningless. Use them for relative comparisons, not absolute truth.

Brand matters more than tracking. Strong brands get direct traffic and word-of-mouth that bypasses all attribution models.

The Death of Marketing Ops

Marketing operations teams built entire careers around attribution modeling. That specialization is becoming obsolete.

The future belongs to marketers who can drive growth without perfect measurement, not analysts who can perfectly measure shrinking visibility.

Old skill: Building complex attribution models
New skill: Making marketing decisions with imperfect data

Embrace the Uncertainty

The best marketers have always known that attribution is mostly fiction. They focus on what drives business results, not what's easy to measure.

AI isn't making marketing unmeasurable—it's making marketing's unmeasurability impossible to ignore.

Stop pretending you can track the untrackable. Start building marketing that works whether you can measure it or not.

Attribution was always a lie. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can start building real marketing strategies.