Multi-touch attribution sounds like the answer. A model that tracks every touchpoint across the buyer journey and assigns each one precise credit. Clean, scientific, defensible.
It’s also, in most real-world implementations, a fiction dressed up in decimal points.
The problem isn’t the math. It’s the assumption underneath it.
Multi-touch models require complete visibility into every touchpoint a buyer has with your brand — every ad impression, every email open, every organic search, every dark-social share of your content in a Slack channel you’ll never see. That visibility doesn’t exist. It never has. So the model fills the gaps with assumptions, and those assumptions get presented with a confidence the underlying data never earned.
You end up with a report that says paid social drove 23% of a conversion. That number feels precise. It isn’t. It’s a guess wearing a lab coat.
Where this actually hurts you
Budget decisions get made on numbers that can’t support the weight. A channel gets defunded because its “attributed” contribution looks weak, when in reality it was doing brand-building work further up the funnel that the model was never built to capture. You end up optimizing for what the model can see, not for what’s actually driving growth.
What to ask your agency instead
Stop asking “can you build us a multi-touch model.” Start asking these three questions:
What can we measure with real confidence, and what are we estimating? A good partner will draw that line clearly instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.
What’s our incrementality testing plan? Holdout tests and geo experiments tell you what a channel actually adds, not just what it touched last before a conversion. This is slower and less tidy than a dashboard number, and it’s far more honest.
How often are we revisiting the model’s assumptions? Attribution models rot. Buyer journeys shift, new channels emerge, and a model built two years ago is quietly lying to you in new ways it wasn’t lying before.
The mindset shift
Perfect attribution is not the goal. Useful directional confidence is. A CMO who says “I’m not certain, but here’s my best evidence-based read, and here’s how I’m testing it” will out-navigate a CMO clinging to a precise-looking number that was never real in the first place.
The agencies worth working with will tell you this without being asked. If yours hasn’t, that’s worth noticing.
About the Author
Kalina Totzeva is a Marketing Manager at DSM, a full-service digital marketing agency based in New Jersey. She manages integrated marketing programs for clients across New Jersey and nationally, with hands-on experience across social media, content, paid media, and account strategy. Kalina’s work is built around one objective: finding the opportunities inside a client’s marketing program that translate directly into growth. She brings a full-picture perspective to every account, connecting channels, strategies, and data into programs that produce results clients can see and measure.