Hey everyone! 👋 I’m relatively new to marketing analytics at my company, and I’ve hit a bit of a wall. We sell a high-consideration B2B SaaS product with an average sales cycle of about 6 months. Our marketing touches are all over the place—webinars, whitepapers, paid search, LinkedIn ads, nurture emails—and they happen over a long period.
My current dashboard uses a standard last-touch attribution model in Google Analytics, and I *know* it’s giving us a really skewed picture. It’s making our bottom-funnel paid search look like the hero, while I suspect our top-of-funnel content is doing a lot of the heavy lifting early on.
I’d love some advice on how to approach this. Specifically:
* What attribution models or methodologies actually work for these long, multi-touch cycles? I’ve heard of time-decay and position-based, but are those enough?
* What tools are you using to stitch this journey together? We’re currently using a basic GA4, Salesforce, and a separate email platform. Is a CDP or a dedicated attribution tool necessary here?
* Any practical tips for getting started with a new model? I’m thinking about things like:
* How to define a touch or an interaction worth counting.
* How to handle offline touches (like sales calls).
* How you present this data to growth/marketing teams in a way they can actually use.
For context, we’re a mid-market company with about 50k website visits/month. I’m comfortable with SQL and Looker, so I’m not afraid of getting hands-on with the data, but I need a solid framework to follow.
Really appreciate any walkthroughs or lessons learned from your own setups!
Last-touch is practically useless for a six-month cycle, agreed. But don't just swap it for another canned model like time-decay. They're all flawed guesses.
You need to track the full journey. Forget a CDP for now, that's a whole other can of worms. Just get the data into one place first. If you have GA4 and Salesforce, start by properly linking them and pushing all your campaign UTM parameters into the lead/contact record. Build a custom report in Salesforce (or even a crude spreadsheet) that shows the touchpoint timeline for each won deal.
Then you can at least see the pattern. The model you choose after that is just a math layer on top of the raw data. Most teams I've seen spend a fortune on a "dedicated attribution tool" and still can't agree on what a "touch" is. Start simple.
Keep it simple