Last month, a marketing director showed me her attribution dashboard. Seven different models. Thousands of data points. Impressive visualizations.

"So which channel is actually driving revenue?" I asked.

Silence.

She had more attribution data than ever. And less clarity than ever. This is the reality for most B2B marketing teams in 2025: attribution is broken, and no vendor is going to fix it.

Why Attribution Stopped Working

Let's be honest about what happened:

Privacy killed the data. iOS 14.5 wiped out mobile tracking. GDPR restricted cookies. Third-party data is disappearing. The foundation attribution was built on - tracking users across the internet - no longer exists.

B2B journeys were never trackable anyway. Your buyer researched you on their personal phone during their commute. They asked a colleague at lunch. They read a review on G2 using their spouse's laptop. They watched your CEO's LinkedIn video without clicking anything. None of this shows up in your attribution model.

Multi-touch attribution became multi-touch fiction. When you can only see 30% of touchpoints, giving "credit" to the ones you can see is statistical theater. You're not measuring what drove the sale. You're measuring what you happened to track.

The attribution vendors know this. They just can't tell you because their business model depends on you believing the opposite.

The Expensive Distraction

Here's what companies do when attribution breaks: they buy more attribution tools.

Marketing intelligence platforms. Data clean rooms. AI-powered modeling. The average enterprise marketing team now uses 19 different tools, many of them promising better attribution.

The result? More dashboards showing different versions of reality. More time arguing about which model is "right." Less time actually marketing.

I've seen companies spend six months evaluating attribution vendors while their competitors shipped campaigns, learned from the market, and captured share. The quest for perfect measurement became the enemy of good marketing.

The Marketing Impact Triangle

If attribution can't tell you what's working, what can?

After years of working through this problem with B2B companies, I've developed a simpler framework. It won't give you false precision. But it will give you clarity.

The Marketing Impact Triangle measures three things:

1. Brand Lift: Are More People Aware of You?

What to measure:

Why it matters: Brand awareness is the moat that compounds over time. When prospects know your name before sales reaches out, everything downstream gets easier. Shorter sales cycles. Higher win rates. Better pricing power.

How to track it: Run quarterly brand lift surveys (simple 3-question polls to your target audience). Track branded search month-over-month. Ask sales to log mentions of unprompted brand awareness in deal notes.

Most attribution models completely miss brand impact because it doesn't create a trackable click. That doesn't make it less valuable - it makes attribution models less useful.

2. Pipeline Velocity: Are Deals Moving Faster?

What to measure:

Why it matters: Marketing's job isn't just to generate leads. It's to create buying conditions that accelerate revenue. If your content, positioning, and nurture programs are working, deals should move faster and convert at higher rates.

How to track it: Compare velocity metrics quarter-over-quarter. Segment by deal source to see where marketing is adding the most momentum. Look for leading indicators - are prospects arriving more educated? Do they need fewer touches before deciding?

This is where marketing impact becomes undeniable. When sales cycles drop from 90 days to 60 days, nobody argues about attribution.

3. Customer Insight Value: Are You Getting Smarter?

What to measure:

Why it matters: Marketing is the company's listening post. Every campaign generates data about what resonates, what doesn't, who responds, and why. This intelligence shapes product, sales, and strategy - value that never shows up in attribution reports.

How to track it: Document one strategic insight from marketing each month. Present it to leadership. Show how it informed decisions. When marketing becomes the source of competitive intelligence, its value transcends lead generation.

Implementing the Triangle

Here's how to shift from attribution theater to impact measurement:

Step 1: Audit Your Current Reports

Look at your weekly marketing report. Ask: "Does this help us make better decisions, or does it just make us feel like we're measuring something?"

Cut the metrics that don't connect to the Triangle. Yes, this means killing some dashboards. That's the point.

Step 2: Establish Baselines

For each Triangle metric, establish where you are today:

You can't show improvement without knowing where you started.

Step 3: Create a Quarterly Review Cadence

Once per quarter, present the Triangle to leadership:

This narrative is more powerful than any attribution dashboard because it connects marketing to business outcomes everyone understands.

What About Accountability?

The common objection: "If we can't attribute, how do we know what to spend on?"

Fair question. Here's the answer:

Run incrementality tests. Instead of trying to attribute every conversion, test whether a channel adds incremental value. Pause Google ads in one region for a month. Did pipeline drop? By how much? That's your answer.

Use marketing mix modeling. MMM doesn't track individual users - it correlates marketing spend with business outcomes at an aggregate level. It works even when cookies don't.

Trust directional data over precise data. "LinkedIn drives more engaged prospects than Google" is useful even without exact percentages. You don't need decimal-point precision to make good decisions.

The companies that obsess over attribution often make worse decisions than companies that trust imperfect signals and move fast. Speed of learning beats precision of measurement.

The Leadership Gap

Moving from attribution dependency to impact measurement requires someone who can:

This is strategic leadership work. It's not about running campaigns - it's about defining how marketing success gets evaluated in your organization.

For growing companies, this often doesn't require a full-time CMO. It requires experienced marketing leadership at key moments: setting up the measurement framework, aligning stakeholders, training the team. Then your operators can execute.

The Bottom Line

Attribution as we knew it is dead. Privacy killed it. Complexity buried it. Chasing it is wasting time and money you don't have.

The Marketing Impact Triangle gives you a simpler, more honest alternative:

Measure these three. Tell the story. Make better decisions.

Your CFO doesn't actually want a perfect attribution model. They want confidence that marketing spend is working. The Triangle gives them that - without the false precision that makes everyone nervous.

Stop chasing clicks. Start measuring impact.