Media attribution is broken: How agencies can fix it

Your team is hitting ROAS targets. The dashboards look good. CPMs are down. CTRs are solid. But the client’s pipeline is flat, and revenue is stuck. Sound familiar?

You’re not alone. Agencies everywhere are struggling to explain why hitting media metrics isn’t leading to real business growth.

Here’s why: your media attribution is “lying” to you. And it’s keeping you in a short-term, bottom-funnel cycle that limits your ability to deliver sustainable, cross-channel growth.

What is media attribution?

Media attribution is the process of identifying which paid media channels and campaigns contribute to a conversion or sale. It shows how ad spend across ad platforms like Google, Meta, or programmatic impacts business outcomes.

Advertising attribution gives you clarity and control over your media performance so you can:

• Identify your top-performing channels: Which ad channels are driving conversions?
• Optimize your marketing spend for better ROI: Where is your budget delivering the highest return?
• Understand cross-channel impact: How do different ad campaigns work together to influence results?

The biggest problems with advertising attribution reports

Agencies have known for years that last-click attribution is flawed. But most are still stuck with it because… it’s familiar:

• Clients expect it
• Forecasts rely on it
• It’s baked into your existing workflow

But it doesn’t work because:

1. Last-click attribution makes paid search look like the hero

Last-click attribution gives all the credit to the final touchpoint before conversion—usually paid search or retargeting. It also ignores all the brand campaigns, upper-funnel tactics, and offline channels that made that conversion possible in the first place. As a result:

• You keep pumping budget into lower-funnel tactics because they “look good.”
• Your top-of-funnel activity gets defunded.
• Your demand eventually dries up. And so does performance.

Many agencies have struggled with this, even after hitting ROAS goals for years. The brand was dying, and no one saw it coming. Last-click attribution in marketing hides the problem until it’s too late.

2. Multi-touch attribution (MTA) isn’t much better than last-click tracking

MTA feels smarter. It splits credit across multiple touchpoints. But it’s still flawed:

• MTA is built on user-level data, and with cookie deprecation and privacy regulations, that’s disappearing fast.
• MTA misses offline and dark social—think podcasts, events, Slack communities, and word of mouth.
• MTA is retrospective. It starts with the conversion and works backward, assigning credit based on observed touchpoints. There’s no sense of causality or marketing incrementality.

A study points out that most existing MTA models don’t correctly adjust for the fact that ads are shown based on user preferences, which messes up the attribution calculations. That means your attribution isn’t just biased—it’s flat-out wrong. You’re giving credit to ads that might not have had any real influence.

Bottom line: MTA doesn’t tell you if your media is driving incremental results.

Read more: MMM vs MTA: The differences between marketing mix modeling and multi-touch attribution

3. ROAS is a vanity marketing metric

High ROAS makes clients happy—until they realize it’s not translating to bottom-line growth.

ROAS only measures attributed revenue. It doesn’t show incremental revenue or iROAS.

Keen’s 2024 analysis shows channels like Display delivering impressive ROI on paper—$2.02 for every dollar spent—but marginal returns fall below $1. The same is shown for TV attribution and search attribution among other earned media attribution channels.

If you’re not measuring mROI over ROI, you’re missing the signal that tells you when to reallocate spend. Your digital media attribution could be getting credit for conversions that would’ve happened anyway. And you wouldn’t know it. 

4. Platform bias skews your media performance

The publisher attribution reports of retail media networks (RMNs) and other ad platforms are designed to make their own channels look good. They don’t talk to each other—so that conversion Google claims? Meta probably claims it, too. This is called double counting.

In fact, a study from the University of Pennsylvania shows that platforms target users likely to convert regardless of ads, inflating attributed conversions without genuinely increasing sales.

5. Over-reliance on clicks ignores real influence

Clicks are easy to measure. But most buyers don’t click before they convert—especially in B2B and high-ticket consumer sales where they might:

• Hear about you on a podcast
• Read a case study 
• Talk to someone at an event or a trade show

None of that shows up in click-based models. But it drives real influence.

6. Short-term ad attribution windows bias you toward quick wins

Most advertising attribution windows are 7, 14, or 30 days. That’s fine for quick wins. But:

• It favors bottom-funnel channels like paid search and retargeting.
• If you’re running brand campaigns, video, or upper-funnel media, the impact often shows up outside those windows.
• You end up underfunding the channels that build long-term demand.

How to improve your media attribution strategy

You need to make three fundamental shifts to survive beyond the last-click attribution world:

1. Shift your mindset to incrementality

The most important question isn’t “What drove the conversion?” It’s “What drove conversions that wouldn’t have happened without media?”

That’s incrementality—and it’s the difference between busywork and true impact. Incrementality testing isolates the true lift from your media spend.

2. Leverage media mix modeling (MMM)

Media mix modeling (MMM) gives you a top-down macro view of media performance:

• Across paid, organic, online, and offline
• Without relying on cookies or user-level data

MMM captures cross-channel effects and shows where you’re hitting diminishing returns.

You’ll see if you’re:

• Overspending on a saturated channel
• Underestimating the brand’s contribution
• Missing opportunities to scale cross-channel impact

Think of MMM as your monthly or quarterly measurement tool, not a day-to-day dashboard. It helps you set flighting strategies, budget allocations, and cross-channel plans that drive real business outcomes. 

The best part: MMM is now accessible to even smaller agencies and brands. Keen combines your data with industry benchmarks and causal analysis—without you having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.

3. Run cross-channel experiments

MMM gives you the big picture. Experiments give you validation. Implement a unified marketing strategy to get concrete proof of what’s truly incremental. 

Use the unified marketing measurement metrics to refine budget allocation and justify your strategy to clients and stakeholders

Steps to win back control of attribution measurement

Fixing ad attribution allows the media buyers to step up as strategic advisors. You’ve moved beyond platform-reported performance. Now it’s about leading the conversation on:

• Budget allocation across marketing channel mix 
• Scaling spend efficiently
• Balancing brand and performance media
• Proving your value with causal insights, not clicks

Here’s what that path looks like:

Step 1: Reset your measurement approach

Most clients are stuck on platform-reported metrics: ROAS, clicks, and last-touch conversions. These numbers don’t reflect what’s really driving growth.

Why it’s costing you: You’re stuck defending short-term performance while ignoring long-term strategy. You lose credibility when leadership sees a pipeline flatline, even when ROAS looks “good.”

How to take control:

• Make incrementality your new success metric. Show which channels are driving net-new results.
• Use MMM to deliver holistic performance insights—across paid, organic, online, and offline.
• Connect media performance directly to pipeline, revenue, and long-term growth, not just clicks and impressions.

Download our marketing mix modeling playbook for a step-by-step approach.

Step 2: Align media planning to cross-channel insights

Agencies are still optimizing channel by channel, instead of thinking cross-channel. Platform silos prevent you from seeing how one channel boosts another.

Why it’s costing you: You over-invest in what looks good in-platform (usually bottom-funnel) and under-invest in brand and upper-funnel. That means diminishing returns and stalled growth.

How to take control:

• Plan media based on cross-channel synergies, not siloed KPIs.
• Use marginal return analysis to know where the next dollar delivers the most incremental value.
• Adjust budgets, flighting schedule, and channel mix based on a holistic view of performance.

Step 3: Own the full-funnel conversation

Most clients are trapped in bottom-funnel thinking. They under-invest in brand and upper-funnel tactics until demand dries up—then scramble to fix it.

Why it’s costing you: Short-term focus leads to demand decay. Without consistent upper-funnel investment, the pipeline dries up—hurting both brand equity and sales. And when the pipeline is flat, they point the finger at you.

How to take control:

• Advocate for consistent investment in brand and upper-funnel media.
• Use data to show how awareness campaigns feed the pipeline and drive downstream conversions.
• Quantify the long-term impact of the brand, not just clicks.

Read more: How to create a full-funnel marketing strategy

Fix your attribution in advertising with Keen

Taking control of media attribution and planning is how you grow your agency. To deliver the most impact today, you need a shift towards cross-channel media planning and full-funnel strategies.

With Keen’s AI-powered MMM platform, you can:

• Prove long-term, incremental impact to clients.
• Plan media spend across channels.
• Balance upper-funnel brand investments with bottom-funnel performance.

Ready to get started? Get a demo to see how Keen fixes media measurement and your advertising attribution.