Can Technology Finally Solve the Achilles Heel of B2B Attribution?

Chris Golec, Founder and CEO of Channel99, is examining whether recent technological advancements can help companies solve the classic B2B attribution problem. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

Over the past three decades, technology has transformed attribution from a rough art into an exact science, allowing businesses to peer through the darkness and attribute actual spend to campaigns. The only issue? For proper attribution, a prospect has historically needed to click on the ad before making a purchase. This type of attribution, known as “click-through” or CTA, is tidy and easy to track (via UTM parameters).

However, it only captures a tiny slice of the B2B sales funnel. Unlike a pair of sneakers or a new shirt, the B2B purchase process spans a much longer period and often involves multiple decision-makers. With an average of 266 touchpoints to close a B2B deal, CTA loses an entire forest of latent interest in search of a few one-off clicks.

In contrast, marketers who screen for view-through attribution (VTA) not only see a nearly 79 percent jump in conversion compared to CTA alone, but also uncover a wealth of new insights. VTA is often a hidden “first touch,” and in the case of organic social and/or industry review sites, is one of the strongest pipeline intent signals. In a world where strong ROI and data-backed results are a matter of survival, VTA’s ability to comprehensively identify these audiences early and often can make all the difference.

That’s why modern, data-driven marketing strategies are now a must-have for B2B marketers, even though implementation is easier said than done.

Click It Isn’t The Ticket: Why Click-Based Attribution is Falling Short

Nearly 25 percent of all marketers still rely solely on click-through, mainly because it’s simple to measure, straightforward for assigning conversion credit, and works with standard analytics dashboards. These guiding forces have propelled CTA to become an industry standard for measurement, and many great campaigns have historically been measured using CTA. However, as every B2B marketing professional knows, ease is often the greatest threat to progress. That’s because while CTA is a great tool for measuring the success of a click-based campaign, it falls woefully short at evaluating the effectiveness of other marketing campaigns.

Despite impressions, brand exposures, social interactions, and moments of influence all having just as much (if not more) influence on whether a deal closes as a digital ad, CTA leaves all of these data points untouched. The result is a massive blind spot that costs marketers untold millions. However, missing ROI isn’t the biggest issue facing marketers who still rely solely on CTA. Faulty campaign design is. Without additional data points, marketers naturally craft campaigns that attract high click volume, which doesn’t correlate with users in a position to buy or understand the intricacies of B2B sales. The result? Reach plummets as finite marketing funds are spent on less effective strategies, while those capable of driving more sales (albeit with fewer clicks) are deprioritized.

The Case for View-Through Attribution

In 2022, the Marketing Management Association reported that, for the first time, over half (53 percent) of all marketers had diversified their attribution strategies to track and optimize marketing performance. It was a step in the right direction, and one that couldn’t have come at a better time, given the rise of AI-assisted attribution soon thereafter. Unlike CTA, VTA is at the forefront of a new marketing paradigm that assigns credit to a campaign when a buyer sees an ad, video, or other piece of content and later converts, even if the buyer never clicked the ad directly. By making measurement far more holistic, exposure joins mere clicks as an additional ROI-ready data point, opening the door to more creative campaigns.

Sometimes, the resulting campaigns signal a far greater level of buyer intent, despite the frequent critique of VTA metrics as passive. Take organic social: It takes time to read a post and then visit a company’s website, far more than a mere click. However, because CTA cannot measure organic social media, it has been critically underleveraged by B2B marketers. Until now.

VTA is the holistic approach to attribution that marketers once dreamed of, and the only way to measure the full ROI of campaigns. It’s an easy decision to switch, but for the ~25 percent of companies still relying solely on CTA, taking the attribution modernization plunge is often harder than it looks.

Avoiding the “Traps” of VTA Adoption

Transitioning from CTA to VTA, when executed well, consistently delivers a wealth of new data metrics, increased ROI, and ultimately more successful campaigns. However, for businesses contending with a patchwork of modern privacy laws and organizational minutiae while undergoing this transformation, potential traps abound.

First, privacy regulations like the GDPR and CCPA have fundamentally reshaped what marketers can track. With many third-party cookies under threat, and first-party tracking likewise facing an uphill battle due to increased browser restrictions and consumer privacy tools, attribution is becoming increasingly difficult to track. In fact, according to a recent study, consent requirements have already reduced the volume of attribution data by 30-40 percent.

That’s why attempting to build a VTA strategy on dying third-party cookies presents such a threat to businesses looking to modernize. Rather than face a “measurement crisis” and contend with data volumes already reduced by consent requirements, companies must invest in cookie-free view-through technology. These systems capture meaningful engagement signals at an account or company level without violating privacy standards.

Once organizations have addressed privacy, they’ll next need to look within. After all, even a VTA plan designed with privacy guidelines in mind will fall apart if besieged by internal pushback. If a channel previously dismissed as “low ROI” under CTA is revealed as a key sales driver, organizations must be willing to forgo their time-tested strategy for a new, data-backed approach. If they can, a renewed focus on generating deals (rather than MQLs) awaits.

Getting Started

For organizations convinced that VTA is the right next step in their marketing evolution and ready to commit to successfully navigating the privacy and organizational roadblocks that lie ahead, let’s get started. Flipping the VTA switch “on” starts with these five steps:

1) Build a new foundation

Start by adopting privacy-forward account identification and leave third-party cookies behind. The backbone of modern measurement is the ability to identify accounts, not just anonymous users, while maintaining robust privacy standards.

2) Unify datasets

B2B buyers don’t live in a single channel, so organizational attribution can’t either. This means integrating tracking (both via APIs and modern pixels) across every touchpoint, from display, ABM programs, and organic social to email and content syndication. The goal is to connect exposures from these disparate sources to actual engagement and revenue outcomes.

3) Screen for data validity

New data streams are useless (or worse) if they’re full of noise. When adopting VTA, it’s critical to incorporate rigorous ad verification and quality controls. This ensures that actual target audience impressions drive current measurement and future strategy decisions, rather than fraudulent bot traffic.

4) Recalibrate performance benchmarks

This is the step that often trips up legacy organizations, but it’s vitally important nonetheless. As metrics begin to shift following VTA adoption, channels that have historically been written off as having “low ROI” may emerge as substantial revenue drivers. Armed with this new data, be prepared to throw out the old click-based playbook and reallocate budget toward the tactics that are truly driving influence, even if they aren’t harvesting the easiest clicks.

5) Loop in the sales team

Since the ultimate goal of VTA is to align the entire revenue operation, any newfound insights from the rollout cannot be confined solely to the marketing department. Instead, new insights should be shared promptly. Only by leveraging the combined talent of both silos, marketing and sales, can organizations finally understand which accounts are generating deals, not just MQLs.

For the past two decades, the most widely used attribution metric has started (and ended) with the mighty cursor. The coming decade, from widespread AI adoption to an ever-evolving financial landscape, will test this reliance like never before. However, B2B marketers needn’t fly blind. By shifting to AI-powered view-through attribution, a far more complete picture of an organization’s marketing strategy and results begins to come into focus. Moving beyond the click and embracing an account-level view of engagement can help organizations finally stop wondering which half of their budget is wasted.