You've seen the dashboard. The one that says LinkedIn produced 312% of pipeline last quarter. The one where every channel claims credit for the same closed-won deal. The one your CFO stopped reading two QBRs ago.
Why attribution becomes fiction
Three reasons: tracking gaps the team hides, multi-touch math nobody can audit, and metrics that exist only because the tool produces them. The result is a dashboard that flatters everyone and helps no one.
The replacement
- Source-level event tracking with public methodology — every UTM, every form, every webhook is logged with a hash you can replay.
- First-touch + last-touch + assist — three views, all visible, none weighted by vendor preference.
- CRM-event-anchored — pipeline is whatever the CRM says it is. The dashboard reconciles to that.
- Baseline-aware — every claim of lift compares to a measured baseline, not a hand-waved counterfactual.
What to stop measuring
- Impressions — useful only as a denominator.
- Engagement scores from social platforms — they aren't comparable across platforms.
- Multi-touch revenue weights you can't explain — if you can't draw the math, neither can the CFO.
Takeaway
A smaller, honest dashboard beats a 40-tile dashboard nobody trusts. Anchor every metric to a CRM event and a methodology you'd publish.