Marketing attribution is the single most contested topic between founders and their agencies — because it's the topic that decides who is right about budget. Most attribution models in mid-market businesses are quietly broken. Here's why, and what to do about it without buying an enterprise platform.
01The two attribution failures
Failure one: trusting platform-side data. Google, Meta and LinkedIn each take credit for conversions using their own logic, often overlapping. Add them up and you'll often see more conversions reported than your CRM actually contains.
Failure two: last-click attribution inside your analytics. It gives credit to whichever channel happened to be the final touchpoint, usually direct or branded search. The work that actually generated the interest goes uncredited and gets cut.
02Fix one: CRM as the single source of truth
Every lead and order in your CRM should carry the original source captured at form-fill, before any internal handover. Not the platform's claim — your captured field. This becomes the only number that goes into the monthly board pack.
03Fix two: weekly reconciliation, not monthly
Pull platform-reported conversions against CRM-recorded conversions weekly. The gap is your reality tax. If the gap widens, something has broken in tracking. If it narrows, your attribution is maturing.
04Fix three: a simple position-based model
You don't need an enterprise platform. Give 40% credit to the first touch, 40% to the last, and split the remaining 20% across the middle. Run it in a spreadsheet against your CRM data. It will tell you more than 90% of paid attribution platforms — and it costs nothing.