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Marketing attribution is grey: how founders should really measure what’s working in 2026

Author

Chintankumar Maisuria
February 02, 2026

Read time: 3 minutes.

Welcome to the 190th edition of The Growth Elements Newsletter. Every Monday and sometimes on Thursday, I write an essay on growth metrics & experiments and business case studies.

Today’s piece is for 8,000+ founders, operators, and leaders from businesses such as Shopify, Google, Hubspot, Zoho, Freshworks, Servcorp, Zomato, Postman, Razorpay and Zoom.

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  • Dashboards are giving founders and operators a false sense of certainty about “what’s working.”

  • Management then makes budget calls based on noisy attribution rather than real business outcomes.

Where attribution actually lies

  • Last‑click overweights navigational behaviour (Google, branded search, soon LLMs) and underweights the hard work of brand, content, and community.

  • Multi‑touch models look sophisticated but are built on subjective weights and incomplete tracking; they create “precision theatre,” not truth.

  • HDYHAU (How did you hear about us) surveys are better, but still biased by memory and recency; they’re a directional story, not a clean dataset.

What attribution is still good for

[1] Use click‑based attribution only for channel tuning:

  • Ad creative testing

  • landing page experiments

  • keyword pruning

  • basic CPA comparisons.

[2] Do not use it to decide:

  • “What channels should we be in?” or

  • “Should we fund brand vs capture?”

  • Those are strategy questions, not spreadsheet questions.

A simple measurement stack for $1-10M ARR

[1] Level 1: Core business metrics (board‑grade):

  • Pipeline created

  • SQOs

  • win‑rate

  • sales cycle

  • CAC

  • CAC payback

  • NRR

  • logo/GRR

[2] Level 2: Source and motion view (founder‑grade):

  • % of pipeline and revenue by motion

    • (outbound, inbound, PLG, partners)

    • by 3–5 “source classes” (search, social/content, community/referral, outbound, partner).

[3] Level 3: Buyer‑reported and modelled view (context):

  • Quarterly HDYHAU pulses

  • Once the spend is high enough

    • A simple MMM can see how major channels move results over time.

How to talk to your Executives/Management

Bring 3 views together, not one magic number:

  1. Click/source data (for performance).

  2. Buyer‑reported “how you heard about us.”

  3. Outcome metrics (pipeline, revenue, CAC payback, NRR) by motion.

Frame marketing in terms of trade‑offs:

  • Here’s where we capture demand

  • Here’s where we create it

  • Here’s the payback profile of each.

Final learnings

  • Treat attribution as a flashlight, not a microscope: useful to see broadly where to walk, dangerous for precise surgery.

  • The board should trust you when you tie marketing to pipeline, CAC payback, and NRR, not when you pretend to know the exact contribution of every impression.

That's it for today's article! I hope you found this essay insightful.

Wishing you a productive week ahead!

I always appreciate you reading.

Thanks,
Chintankumar Maisuria