Why Tech Startups Struggle with Marketing Attribution

B2B Tech Marketers Struggle with Attribution …

Few subjects cause quite as much navel-gazing and frustration in B2B technology marketing as attribution.

As marketers, we are constantly asking:

• Where did that lead come from?
• Which campaign generated it?
• Which channel deserves the credit?
• Did the prospect find us through Google, LinkedIn, an event, a recommendation, an email or a piece of content?
• What is our customer acquisition cost?
• What is the ROI of marketing?

These are perfectly reasonable questions. In fact, they are questions every technology startup should eventually be able to answer with increasing confidence. The problem is that attribution has become so complicated that many marketing teams spend more time trying to understand their measurement systems than they do generating demand, and that is a problem.

The Customer Journey

A typical prospect might read a blog article, see a LinkedIn post, hear about the company from a colleague, visit the website, download an eGuide, attend an event, read a review, receive an email, speak to a salesperson and then disappear for three months.

They might return after:

• Seeing another social post,
• Asking an industry analyst for an opinion.
• Speaking to an investor, consultant, existing customer or technology partner.
• Watching a video.
• Reading a case study.
• Visiting the pricing page.

Eventually, they might contact the company, but which one of those activities generated the lead? The honest answer is probably all of them, and none of them. The prospect was gradually educated, influenced and reassured by a collection of interactions. That is what makes B2B attribution so difficult.

The Buyer Journey is a Library of Touchpoints

The traditional direct-response model was much easier, but we are long past that now. For example, someone would see an advertisement, click on it, fill in a form and become a lead. The connection was distinct and obvious; the channel responsible was clear and defined. Modern B2B buying is different because marketing activity is increasingly distributed across multiple channels and formats. A prospect might consume ten or twenty pieces of content without ever identifying themselves.

Before a lead has even made themselves known, they may have:

• Been influenced by a company’s reputation long before they enter the CRM.
• Searched independently.
• Asked peers for recommendations.
• Read customer reviews.
• Walked onto the company’s stand at an event.
• Seen employees posting on LinkedIn.
• Watched a product demonstration.

By the time a lead finally completes a contact form, the marketing team may only have visibility of the last few steps. This explains why inbound marketing with content creation at its core has become so important today. This creates what is sometimes described as the dark funnel — activity that influences the buyer but isn’t easily captured by conventional tracking. B2B measurement research increasingly recognises this problem. Buyers operate through multiple channels, with buying committees and extended sales cycles, making it difficult to connect every influence with a specific outcome. The result is uncomfortable for marketers, because the data is incomplete.

Attribution Doesn’t Necessarily Tell You What Caused the Purchase

It’s important to make this distinction. Attribution tells you what happened within the measurement system but doesn’t necessarily indicate what caused the customer to buy. Those are two very different things. Imagine a prospect visits your pricing page and then requests a demonstration. A conventional scoring model might assign that activity a high score, but what does the pricing-page visit really tell you? Perhaps they are ready to buy, but they could also just be curious, were sent there by a competitor, are researching the market or they’re looking for a specific piece of information.

The same applies to content downloads. If a prospect downloads a whitepaper, does that mean they have buying intent? Not necessarily. They might have downloaded it because they liked the title, are researching a subject for university or were helping a colleague. They might be nowhere near a buying decision. The problem is that marketers often assign numerical values to these actions as if they represent objective evidence. Most of the time they don’t; these values represent assumptions and nothing more. There is nothing inherently wrong with assumptions when they are clearly understood as hypotheses. The problem begins when assumptions become presented as facts.

The Attribution Industry is Not Broken – But Expectations Are

It would be tempting to conclude that B2B attribution doesn’t work, and if you believe that, then it is true for you. The evidence doesn’t support such a sweeping conclusion. Research by 6sense in 2025 found that attribution is extremely widespread: 92% of Account-Based Marketing organisations and 68% of legacy B2B organisations reported using an attribution model. The same research, however, found that the foundations are far from perfect. Its conclusion was particularly revealing, stating that attribution is widely adopted but organisations still struggle to do it well. Multi-touch attribution is popular, yet sophisticated statistical approaches capable of estimating actual impact remain relatively uncommon.

In other words, the problem isn’t that marketers don’t believe in attribution. The real issue is that many don’t yet have the data, infrastructure or methodology to make it genuinely reliable and therefore useful. Many B2B marketers struggle to track activity between specific buyer stages or to measure impact across channels and campaigns. Another obstacle is insufficient resources, as many marketers still report results manually using Excel. That sounds less like an attribution failure and more like a measurement maturity problem.

You may want to read: “7 Steps to Build Marketing Attribution.”