What’s Changing & How to Close Gaps

Attribution can be confusing in the modern marketing age. But the pressure on marketing teams to “prove what’s working” never goes away.

Traditionally, marketers have had some data we could always rely on, but the data pool we can draw from is growing and shrinking at the same time. Between privacy barriers, zero-click searches, AI review, and channel walled gardens, marketers are flying blind in more ways than they realize. Attribution has always been an imperfect science. And in 2025, it is scattered from Fiji.

If you’re planning a marketing budget and trying to defend where your spend is going, there’s no need to shell out. Marketing attribution is possible. It didn’t seem like it, though. And if you’re still relying solely on touch-based models or last-click reports, you’ll be measuring the wrong things entirely.

Let’s break down where attribution is failing, what’s making it difficult, and what forward-looking marketers are doing to close the gap.

The key path

• Attribution challenges have multiplied due to AI, automation, and privacy shifts.
• Walled gardens, offline sales, and dark social are big blind spots, and they often overlap.
• Deterministic, giving way to touch-based attribution models and probabilistic methods.
• AI isn’t just the problem, it’s also part of the solution.
• You don’t need perfect data. You need data that helps you make better decisions.

The new face of attribution

Attribution used to be about sewing the clicks together. Now, we’re lucky if there’s zero clicks thanks to search.

Today’s shoppers bounce between different platforms on multiple devices and AI-curated content. They’re inspired by ads on a connected TV or product mentions in a ChatGPT thread, and none of them leave a clean digital trail.

Meanwhile, ad platforms like Meta and Google have leaned heavily into automation. This means fewer transparent levers to optimize and more “black box” performance metrics. According to NP Digital Analysis, Google and meta ads have less than 90% optimization permissions today compared to 2023. So, yes, attribution marketing is back. But the infrastructure around it seems more broken than ever.

Finding Marketing Blind Spots

Unfortunately, the reality is that blind spot warnings don’t come with warning lights. Maybe you’re staring straight at your dashboard and don’t realize traffic is piling up in areas you’re not tracking. And the amount of potential blind spots is increasing.

Here are the big ones:

• Walled gardens: Platforms like Google, Meta, and Amazon are all powerful, but have become more mysterious as search has evolved. You’re renting their space, but if you don’t play by their rules, you may not get full visibility.
• Offline sales: Leads are converted into deals in CRMs, call centers, or retail. They may have started as a click, but the customer journey ends at a brick-and-mortar location or a completely different platform than the original click.
• Cross-device travel: An ad viewed on mobile may not convert from their phone, but they can easily become a sale on their desktop or smart TV.
• Building awareness: Upper-funnel spend (such as digital out-of-home (OOH) or video) is reduced because it rarely leads to direct conversions.
• Black society: Private sharing (think WhatsApp, SMS, Signal) appears as “direct” in attribute models, but isn’t.
• LLM Traffic: People are discovering brands through big language models, and those references are often hidden in GA4.

To make matters worse, these blind spots can stack. Before you know it, you’ll find yourself in a nightmare marketing scenario where you’re not just missing one data signal, you’re missing a combination of them, making optimization even more difficult.

New Attribution Trends and Technologies

you can do Keep them all going. It just requires a switch in perspective. Marketers should evaluate their campaigns using a combination of attribution modeling and traditional touch-based metrics. You can never fully connect every dot, and that’s okay. The goal isn’t perfection, just enough clarity to justify marketing budget allocations.

Modern marketers are using these tools:

• Increment testing: Geoholdout and lift studies to isolate what is actually moving the needle.
• MMM (Marketing Mix Modeling): Especially useful for large budget or mixed channel strategies.
• Correlation analysis: Pre/post testing, contextual lift, and even proxy signals like brand search volume.
• Unified First Party Data: Clean, consistent CRM and web data are feeding both our models and our platform.

The best strategy finds these methods based on the level of costs, complexity and volume of conversions. Leveraging AI in your marketing efforts is a great way to automate as much of this research as possible and maximize the benefits of these tactics.

Ai and blind spots

Some marketers may feel as if AI is killing off attribution. While this may be true, technology is also helping to rebuild it.

Here’s how AI is stepping up:

• Generative AI: LLMs like ChatGPT are now discovery platforms. They drive traffic, but they don’t always identify themselves unless you tag them.

• AI Coworker: Agentic AI simulates user behavior, checks messaging, and can even help configure GA4 tracking automatically.

• Machine learning model: Used in MMM and platform attribution to improve forecasting, assign contributions and make predictions.

Still, only 55% of marketers trust AI-generated insights, according to Kocidol. The key is to think of AI as a support, not an authority. Use it to speed up testing and build models, but validate with your own data.

Analytics platforms like Adobe Analytics are also taking steps to improve attribution with AI tools. In October they released a new referral category called “Conversational AI Tools” to separate traffic from ChatGPT and other LLMs from other channels marketers.

Closing the gap with an attribution strategy

So, how do you go from blind spots to better planning? You don’t need a perfect explanation. You need consistent signals and smart strategy.

Here are some ways marketers are closing the attribution gap:

1. Clear your first-party data: Data from internal sources like your website and CRM needs to be reliable. These are your most important sources of truth.
2. Use multiplication: Adjust performance based on geo-lift or experimental results. Not every click counts equally.
3. Invite questions: Models are close. Encourage teams to challenge them and improve over time.
4. Survey your customers: Ask where they heard about you. It’s old school, but incredibly effective for the context.
5. Use offer codes and landing pages: Even if not perfect, they generate new signals in dark social or offline.
6. Track “AI referrers”.: To separate performance from LLM-driven traffic, create custom=channels in your web analytics including in GA4.

Linking attribution to business results

Attribution and business results go hand in hand. Understanding where your most profitable leads originate is essential to growing any business, regardless of size.

You want to connect your data to actual decisions, such as forecasting, budgeting and resource allocation. But, with the marketing landscape changing so quickly and rapidly, how do you know which metrics to follow?

These are the metrics that matter now:

• Total conversions And Additional conversions
• Conversion cost over time
• Cost per additional conversion
• Spend thresholds strategically
• Directional change (old model vs. new)

Remember: even if your models aren’t perfect, if they get you close to optimal costs, it’s working. Continuous improvement to your attribution strategy will get you closer and closer.

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The result

When it comes to effective attribution, you need to see enough to get ahead.

Mastering this skill in the modern marketing world is less about fixing credit and more about making smart calls with yourself. can do measurement. The key is to stop chasing perfection and start building a system that helps you plan and adapt to the data you collect in real time from your testing. Attribution isn’t the whole picture, but it’s a great tool we have to illuminate the way forward, including its blind spots.

Naturally, we can still learn from tried-and-true marketing methods. We may just have to think outside the box about how to apply them to today’s search environment and customer journey. It’s worth checking out our guides on which marketing campaigns have the best impact and how to track your marketing ROI. Combining this additional information with your new attribution approach may be the secret sauce to keep you ahead of the pack in 2026.

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