Marketing Attribution Made Simple: Scott on The Agents of Change

I joined Rich Brooks on The Agents of Change to make the case that marketing attribution is not some enterprise-only luxury, and that a lot of the campaigns people write off as failures are quietly making them money.

I told Rich the story I always come back to, because it is the reason Wicked Reports exists. Back around 2013, a close friend of mine from Maine started Get Maine Lobster, shipping lobster all over the country. He told me Facebook does not work for lobster. He had spent four grand and made a single two-hundred-dollar sale, and he was ready to swear off it forever. I thought there might just be a delay in the sales, so I hacked together a way to track the full journey. It turned out he broke even within a month, and after ninety days he was at ten to one, once you accounted for the Facebook traffic that later converted through email and SMS. That campaign that looked like a disaster became a multi-million dollar channel. The attribution model he was using had been lying to him.

That conversion lag has not gone away. If anything it is more common now, and people still glance at their platform reports, see no sales today, and pull the plug on the thing that was actually working.

The framing I gave Rich for attribution is simple: it is a scoreboard for your marketing. It is not about which fancy model you trot out. The only question that matters is whether it gives you clarity on what to do next. And the biggest mistake I see is people hunting for one holy-grail model. I am vehemently against that. Your measurement strategy has to match your marketing strategy. That is what we call setting an intention: it decides which clicks count, how much credit to give, which KPI is your North Star, and how long the game is you are actually playing. Trying to acquire new customers needs a longer window and a focus on new customer acquisition cost. Nurturing existing customers needs something else entirely. You pick the tool for the job.

We also got into a few things I feel strongly about. If you have a small budget, ten grand a month or under, focus on one channel and start with lead attribution, because a click is a strong signal. Do not chase lead volume without connecting it to revenue, or you will end up buying cheap leads that never turn into customers instead of the fewer, pricier ones that do. And I will always tell you I hate survey data for attribution, because I barely remember what I did two days ago, let alone which ad I saw a month before I bought something. A click you can prove beats a fuzzy memory every time.

We closed on AI, where I gave my honest take: used the right way it is a huge time saver, but on its own it likes to show off, it hallucinates, and it genuinely does not understand the passage of time. For data, you want boring and consistent. It took my team and an AI engineering firm nine months to get ours governed enough to trust.

It is a practical, small-business-friendly conversation, and Rich is a great host. Give it a listen.