Every eighteen months the attribution landscape declares a crisis. This time the crisis is real: third-party cookies are functionally gone on the majority of browsers, mobile identifiers are restricted by default, and the walled gardens got taller. Here is what we see working in production across our customer base.
1. Position-based multi-touch still wins for B2B
For sales cycles longer than 30 days, a 40-20-40 position-based model remains the most defensible default. It gives awareness channels credit without letting them claim the deal, and it's explainable to a CFO in one sentence — which matters more than any modeling sophistication.
Rule of thumb: if your attribution model needs a whitepaper to defend, your marketing team will stop trusting it within two quarters.
2. Incrementality tests beat every model
Geographic holdouts and audience split tests are the only methodology that measures causation rather than correlation. The barrier is organizational, not technical: you need a channel team willing to have a bad quarter in one region. Start with paid social — it's where the gap between modeled and measured impact is largest.
3. Marketing mix modeling is back, and it's cheap now
With warehouse-native tooling, an MMM that used to cost a six-figure consulting engagement runs on a weekly dbt job. You won't get campaign-level granularity, but you'll get a sanity check on channel-level spend that no click-based model can provide.
What to do on Monday
- Stop reporting last-click as "the" number; report it as one column next to position-based and a 90-day incrementality baseline.
- Merge web and product events into one schema — you can't attribute what you can't join.
- Pick one channel for a geographic holdout this quarter. Yes, it will hurt a dashboard somewhere.
Want the benchmark data behind these conclusions? Ask us for the 2026 benchmark report — we send it with no strings attached.