Wow—left me chuckling and nodding so hard I nearly knocked over my coffee. At INBOUND and in his follow-up “Attribution is garbage,” says Jay Schwedelson—and he’s not wrong. His point that “marketing is surround sound” absolutely nails the B2B marketer’s dilemma: when a prospect finally hits that offer, it’s not the final click that made the magic—it’s everything that came before.
In B2B, the problem is even deeper. Marketers often assume the faint echoes they can track represent the whole journey. But that’s like trying to forecast success based only on the survivors—and ignoring the silent majority. Classic survivorship bias. The conclusions we draw from the visible subset? Poor predictors of what’s actually driving outcomes.
Jay’s not suggesting we throw measurement under the bus—he literally says, “Of course you wanna measure all the stuff, and should” . But he’s absolutely right: measuring only what your tracking tools can capture gives you a dangerously incomplete picture. The focus on last-touch attribution blinds us to all the pre-click content, interactions, and signals that built the bridge.
Here’s where I’d drop the mic:
- Attribution is an inside marketing metric, and should not be shared outside of marketing. More importantly, we as marketers should be talking Contribution, i.e. marketing’s impact on revenue pipeline.
- Survivorship bias isn’t about planes or funds—it’s about journeys. In B2B, our analytics only see the “survivors”—those who converted.
- Holdout groups are brilliant: skipping marketing to a control segment (say, 5–10%) and comparing outcomes gives the only reliable counterfactual to show what really works—or doesn’t.
- Let’s stop pretending our pixels and touchpoints capture the whole story. They don’t—even close friends of ours who forward us content could lurk in other channels unseen.
So yes, Jay… attribution is garbage when it’s presented as gospel. But that doesn’t mean we abandon rigor—it means we evolve. Embrace the blindspot. Then test. Then iterate. Then rotate those holdouts and laugh when the control group embarrasses your “brilliant” campaign performance.
