26 Jun The Great Attribution Fade – Welcome to the Grey Zone

There was a time not long ago when marketing felt like a science. Clicks were counted. Funnels were tracked. CMOs would roll into board meetings like Wall Street analysts, armed with spreadsheets that traced every lead from Google ad to gated ebook to closed/won deal.

It was the golden age of attribution.

Marketers became data farmers. If a certain ad brought in ten deals last quarter, we’d just plant more of that crop. If email drove conversions, we’d A/B test subject lines until the cows came home. Marketing became predictable, quantifiable, almost mechanical.

But then, it all went grey.

The Slow Death of Precision

Attribution didn’t collapse overnight. It eroded.

• Google began masking keyword data, stripping marketers of the once-treasured insight into what search terms actually drove traffic.
• Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection rolled out in 2021, making email open rates nearly meaningless by preloading tracking pixels.
• Third-party cookies were deprecated, and browsers began limiting tracking capabilities altogether. First-party data became the new gold, but building it was slow and expensive.
• Platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and influencers in short-form video (SFV) exploded, generating massive awareness – but without trackable clicks or UTM tags.
• And most recently, a huge portion of website traffic now shows up as “direct,” a black hole that could be SEO, dark social, email, or anything else.

Despite this, many CMOs still chase the dream of black-and-white attribution. They attribute lead surges to “the website,” failing to realize the site is just a catcher’s mitt for the unseen pitches thrown from dozens of fragmented influence points across the internet.

The Modern Marketing Mirage

In 2025, attribution is largely a mirage. And insisting on perfect traceability is becoming a liability. The game has changed – but some players haven’t.

You can’t track a TikTok mention that gets shared in a group chat. You can’t UTM a DM. You can’t tag the moment a doctor sees your brand’s name while scrolling LinkedIn at 11 p.m. and mentally logs it as credible. And when that doctor finally visits your site 10 days later and fills out a lead form? Your CRM logs the source as “Direct.”

The numbers look clean – but the path was anything but.

Marketing Is a Tide Again

Oddly enough, we’ve come full circle.

In the 1980s, marketing impact was inferred. A product ad on page 17 of a trade magazine or a clever jingle on TV might spark interest – but you never knew for sure. Success was measured by overall lift. Sales were up? Marketing must be working.

That’s where we are again today. The sharp scalpel of attribution has dulled into a wide paintbrush of influence. Savvy marketers now look for correlated impact, not perfect tracking:

• A spike in demo requests following a viral TikTok.
• A rising trend in branded search volume after PR coverage.
• A surge in inbound leads after a podcast guest appearance – despite no direct call-to-action.

What the New Guard Measures

If the old guard still chases spreadsheet purity, the new guard has recalibrated. Here’s what we now measure:

• Branded search volume – Are more people looking for you?
• Share of voice across platforms – Are you showing up in conversations, even informally?
• Dark social mentions – Is your content being shared in untraceable ways?
• Trendlines, not snapshots – Is your pipeline consistently rising over time?
• Lagging but sustained effects – Did that influencer mention from three weeks ago start to move the needle?

And most importantly: revenue velocity. Are we growing? Are deals closing faster? Are qualified leads coming in without us having to explain who we are?

Final Thought: A Call for Attribution Humility

The age of perfect tracking is over. The marketing world is fragmented, human, and deeply analog again. Influence happens where pixels can’t follow. That’s not failure – it’s evolution.

So, to the old-guard CMOs: Let go of the attribution obsession. Stop pretending that your website is the only reason people convert. It’s just the finish line – there’s a messy marathon before it.

And to the new guard: Embrace the blur. Get comfortable with correlation. Make noise in places that don’t show up in reports. Trust your instincts, track the right trends, and remember: the tide always lifts before it shows up in Salesforce.

We’re not back to the Stone Age.

We’re just back to marketing.