Why it matters
Budgets follow attribution. If your model over-credits the last click, you'll pour money into the channels that close deals and starve the ones that create them, then wonder why the pipeline dries up. Bad attribution doesn't just misreport marketing; it reallocates it, badly.
How it works
Analytics tools assign credit for a conversion across the touchpoints they can see. The catch is what they can't see: word of mouth, dark social, an AI assistant's recommendation, the podcast mention, all of which surface as "direct" or vanish entirely.
The right posture is triangulation: model the clicks, ask customers how they found you, and watch branded search volume as a proxy for everything invisible.
What to do about it
Add one question to every new-customer flow: "how did you hear about us?" It's crude, and it routinely contradicts the dashboard in ways that save real money.
