As businesses track every penny during uncertain economic times, marketing attribution has become a defining challenge.
Nearly eight in ten B2B marketers say proving return-on-investment has grown significantly more important in the past two years, while almost nine in ten admit they struggle to measure the long-term impact of their campaigns.
LinkedIn
In today’s tightening economy, showing ROI is not just a reporting headache for marketers. It’s a matter of survival in the job.
When boards and CFOs demand proof that marketing drives revenue, chief marketing officers can’t afford to rely on incomplete or outdated attribution methods. If marketing departments lack the right infrastructure for attribution, showing the real business impact of campaigns becomes nearly impossible. This is especially true as the multi-touch, B2B buying journey grows more complex over time.
And as AI-driven decision-making takes hold, attribution accuracy is becoming foundational. That’s why updating attribution methods in B2B is no longer optional. It’s a must-have for modern, data-driven marketing strategies.
The Limits of Click-Based Attribution
Most B2B marketers today still rely heavily on click-based attribution, an approach that assigns credit for conversions to the ads or campaigns that generated a click before a sale or form fill. It’s tidy and easy to track (via UTM parameters), and it fits neatly into standard analytics dashboards.
But click-based attribution is also incomplete. B2B purchase decisions are rarely linear.
Research shows that the average B2B software deal takes 266 touchpoints to close.
HockeyStack
With this statistic in mind, click-based attribution is capturing roughly 0.0037% of the buyer journey. When it comes to impressions, brand exposures, social interactions, and moments of influence that help to shape buying intent, these are all being left on the table when ROI is calculated.
It’s an enormous blind spot, and it costs marketers untold millions in misallocated spending and missed opportunities.
Campaigns that seem to perform poorly under a click model could, in fact, be quietly driving the majority of pipeline influence. Meanwhile, channels that attract easy clicks may be getting undue credit for deals they didn’t truly influence. With the current lack of visibility for many marketers, it’s difficult to tell.
View-Through Attribution
View-through attribution is a method that can fill in many of these missing pieces for marketers.Rather than relying solely on clicks, view-through attribution gives credit to a campaign when a buyer sees an ad, video, or other piece of content and later converts, even if that buyer never clicked directly on the ad. Unlike click-tracking, this method measures the real-world influence of exposure and awareness, offering a clearer and more accurate view of what drives revenue.
Modern view-through systems have become more precise, uncovering far more engagement than click-only attribution alone, showing patterns of influence across channels that were previously invisible. In some cases, such as organic social, view-through attribution even suggests a much higher level of buyer intent, as it takes time to read a post and then visit a company’s website.
When B2B marketers adopt view-through attribution, they often discover that their pipeline is being shaped in unexpected ways. Organic social, executive thought leadership, and awareness campaigns, often dismissed as soft metrics, have emerged as some of the strongest predictors of purchase intent. LinkedIn content is just one powerful example.
The Paradigm Shift in B2B Marketing
As view-through attribution moves into the mainstream, it will fundamentally reshape the way B2B marketing departments operate. It will also change how marketing is valued internally. Channels that have been dismissed as low ROI under the click-based measurement of the past will be revealed to be drivers of growth.
The shift will likely lead to organizations doubling down on their investments in brand awareness, top-of-funnel programs, and organic social engagement, all areas that may have looked weak under click-based tracking. New measurement tools will show them to be the revenue generators they really are.In a view-through-driven world, marketers will finally have the data to demonstrate their campaigns have influence across the entire buyer journey, not just the last click before conversion.
This evolution could mark the end of the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) as a primary metric of success. With the ability to track account-level engagement and influence without requiring clicks or form fills, marketers can shift their focus from generating leads to generating deals, something that tracks more closely with sales and revenue outcomes.
The Challenge of Privacy
Attribution programs don’t exist in a vacuum. Privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA have fundamentally changed what metrics marketers can track and how they are allowed to do it. With third-party cookies on their way out and browsers tightening restrictions, attribution accuracy is becoming more difficult.
Consent requirements have already reduced attribution data volume by 30-40%.
Secure Privacy
This has brought about a sort of measurement crisis for B2B advertisers. The majority say privacy laws will significantly impact their ability to deliver personalized advertising and accurate attribution.
View-through attribution has benefits in this challenging environment. Modern view-through systems can function effectively in cookie-free environments, using privacy-compliant, account-level signals to connect impressions with engagement. This makes them both more resilient to regulation and more aligned with the ethical, privacy-first future of digital marketing.
Increasingly, newer forms of attribution are not just a good idea for B2B marketers; They are a necessity.
Getting Started
Transitioning from click-based to include view-through attribution is more than flipping a switch. It demands a deliberate approach, and its steps include:
Build Privacy-Forward Account Identification: Develop or adopt technology capable of identifying accounts without relying on third-party cookies. This is the backbone of accurate, privacy-compliant view-through measurement.
Integrate Cross-Channel Tracking: Implement APIs and tracking pixels that can monitor impressions across display, ABM, social, email, and content syndication channels. The goal is to create a unified dataset connecting exposures to engagement and outcomes.
Layer in Ad Verification and Quality Controls: Ensure your view-through data reflects real impressions, not bots or irrelevant audiences. Verification layers are foundational for maintaining trustworthy metrics.
Recalibrate Performance Benchmarks: Expect your metrics to shift. Channels once written off will suddenly grow in importance. Other channels may do the opposite. Be ready to reallocate budget toward the tactics that are truly driving influence.
Loop in the Sales Team: Revenue teams can be brought into the process once new insights have come to light. View-through data is most powerful when shared, as it helps both marketing and sales teams understand which accounts are coming to life, and why.
B2B marketers have been flying half-blind for years. They have been optimizing around clicks when clicking is not what most buyers do.
In a world where AI, privacy, and economic pressure are rewriting the rules of marketing, those who can see the full engagement picture will be poised to prosper in the future. The rest will keep mistaking activity for impact and wondering what happened to their ROI.
View-through attribution won’t just fill in the gaps for marketers and the organizations that employ them. It will change the whole perspective on marketing.
©2025 DK New Media, LLC, All rights reserved | DisclosureOriginally Published on Martech Zone: The Expensive Problem: Why B2B Marketers Are Blind to Most of Their ROI