marketingartificial intelligence
Beyond the Click: Why Transforming B2B Attribution Starts with AI
Over the past three decades, technology has transformed attribution from a rough art into an exact science, allowing businesses to peer through the darkness and attribute actual spend to campaigns. However, as B2B sales cycles continue to lengthen, are our current attribution strategies keeping up?
To find out, I recently caught up with Chris Golec, a martech industry veteran who pioneered the ABM category and founded Demandbase. Chris is now the Founder and CEO of Channel99, an online platform that enhances attribution and marketing decision-making using AI.
To begin, why do you feel the current attribution standard (Click-Through Attribution, or CTA) is failing B2B marketers?
It all comes down to the increasing complexity of the B2B purchase process. Historically, to ensure proper attribution, we've expected a prospect to click an ad before purchasing. This "click-through" method is tidy and easy to track via UTM parameters.
The problem with this approach is that it captures only a tiny slice of the B2B sales funnel. Unlike selling a pair of sneakers to a consumer, the B2B process is long and involves multiple decision-makers. With an average of 266 touchpoints to close a B2B deal, relying solely on CTA means you are losing an entire forest of latent interest just to find a few one-off clicks.
If CTA is only a "tiny slice," what does the rest of the B2B sales funnel look like? What is the alternative?
The alternative is View-Through Attribution (VTA for short). This approach assigns credit when a buyer sees an ad, video, or piece of content and later converts, even if they never clicked the ad directly.
The results speak for themselves. Marketers who screen for VTA see a nearly 79% jump in conversion compared to CTA alone. It uncovers a wealth of insights, often revealing a hidden "first touch"—like organic social or industry review sites—that CTA completely misses. In today’s world, data-backed results are a matter of survival for marketers. VTA allows us to identify these audiences early and often.
If the data is so much stronger, why are nearly 25% of marketers still relying solely on click-through?
Ease is often the greatest threat to progress. CTA is simple to measure and works with standard analytics dashboards. More than any other factors, these two traits have made it the industry standard.
But this convenience comes at a cost. While CTA measures click-based campaigns well, it falls woefully short when asked to evaluate any other types of campaigns. Impressions, brand exposure, and social interactions often have just as much influence on deal closing as a digital ad does, yet CTA leaves these data points untouched.
That’s not even the worst part, though. Without view-through data, marketers naturally craft campaigns to attract high click volumes, but those often don’t speak to the intricacies of B2B sales, or connect with users in a position to buy. That’s why my #1 piece of advice to marketers is this: Craft your campaigns and measure success with sales at the center, nothing else. When it comes to attribution, that means leveraging VTA and CTA.
Let’s talk about implementation. For companies ready to modernize, what are the "traps" they need to avoid?
The biggest trap right now is privacy. Regulations like GDPR and CCPA have fundamentally reshaped what marketers can track. The third-party cookie is under threat, and consent requirements have already reduced attribution data volume by 30-40%.
To avoid a measurement crisis, businesses must invest in cookie-free view-through technology. These systems capture engagement signals at an account or company level without violating privacy standards.
In addition to privacy, are there any other issues that modernizing companies should look out for?
Absolutely. Once you solve the privacy piece, you still have to contend with company culture. The insights that VTA can provide are so substantial compared to CTA that a lot of old assumptions get called into question as soon as the new data comes in. Having a company-wide growth mindset and being willing to abandon time-tested strategies for a new, data-backed approach isn’t always easy, but it’s essential for success.
For our readers who are ready to make the switch, how do they begin? Is there a roadmap?
Absolutely. For any organization that’s ready to go all-in on VTA, I would recommend these five steps:
- Build a new foundation: Adopt privacy-forward account identification. Leave third-party cookies behind and focus on identifying accounts, not just anonymous users.
- Unify your datasets: B2B buyers don't live in a single channel. You need to integrate tracking across every touchpoint—display, ABM, organic social, email, etc.—to connect exposures to revenue.
- Screen for data validity: New data streams are useless if they are full of noise. Incorporate rigorous ad verification to ensure you are measuring actual target audience impressions, not bot traffic.
- Recalibrate performance benchmarks: Be prepared to throw out the old click-based playbook. Reallocate budget toward tactics that are truly driving influence from your target accounts and addressable market, the rest is noise..
- Loop in the sales team: Don't keep these insights in the marketing silo. Share them promptly so both teams can understand which accounts are generating deals.
Any final thoughts?
For the past two decades, our most widely used attribution metric started and ended with the cursor. But with the rise of AI, that reliance will be tested like never before.
By shifting to AI-powered, view-through attribution, a far more robust and complete strategy picture comes into focus for marketers. It’s past time to move beyond the click.
