Paid Media in a Post Attribution World

How to Scale Paid Media When Attribution Breaks

As marketers, we’ve always wanted to know exactly which ad, keyword or channel drove a sale.

For decades, we relied on pixels and cookies to stitch together the customer journey, credit every click and optimise spend. But privacy regulations and platform updates have changed the game.

Key Takeaways from paid media attribution playbook

• Attribution is broken. Third party cookies are disappearing, platforms restrict tracking and analytics tools oversimplify journeys.
  
  
• Behaviour beats source. Measuring repeat sessions, scroll depth and offer engagement reveals intent better than last click reports.
  
  
• Content drives demand. Buyers consume educational materials and share them privately long before filling out a form.
  
  
• Offers and experience matter. Compelling offers pull prospects back and frictionless journeys accelerate conversion.
  
  
• First party data is the future. Identity resolution, server side tracking and behavioural event collection are essential.
  
  
• Dark social is powerful. More than 70% of social sharing happens in private channels. Design content that people want to share.
  
  

Safari and Firefox block third-party cookies by default, and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency has severely limited Facebook attribution. Google’s phase-out of third-party cookies in Chrome (delayed to 2024 - 25) will remove the final crutch. Without cross-site tracking, traditional attribution models simply stop working.

At the same time, marketing complexity has exploded. Cannes 2024 data showed that only 6% of advertising drives value, yet legacy attribution tools can’t specify which particular ad practice is being attributed in this case. 

Google Analytics and similar platforms struggle to track multi-channel, cross-device journeys. They oversimplify the “messy middle,” crediting the last click while ignoring the touchpoints that actually create demand.

On top of that, dark social private sharing via messaging apps, emails, and community accounts for more than 70% of social sharing and cannot be seen in analytics. B2B buyers complete most of their journey in this dark funnel before ever filling out a form.

In this post attribution world, chasing perfect data is a fool’s errand. Instead, we need to shift our mindset from trying to credit every click to understanding behaviours and intent.

Below are four principles to help you build a paid media strategy that thrives even when attribution is broken.

1. Track Behaviours, Not Just Sources

When attribution pixels break, most marketers focus on last click sources. But how visitors behave on your site tells you far more about their likelihood to convert.

The cookieless future demands first-party behavioural data such as repeated sessions, time on site, scroll depth and engagement with interactive elements. Behavioural event tracking is one of the three pillars of attribution-ready data collection in the cookieless era.

Here’s what to watch:

• Repeat sessions and page velocity. Do users come back multiple times before purchasing? In B2B sales, it often takes dozens of touches across devices to close a deal. Track returning visits and the time between them. Rising revisit rates often indicate growing intent.
• Scroll depth and content engagement. How far down a page do visitors scroll? Are they interacting with comparison tables, calculators or product demos? These micro conversions reveal serious buyers. Tools like heatmaps and session replays can expose friction points that generic CTR metrics miss.
• Offer tool engagement. Are users engaging with offers such as “calculate your ROI,” “download our comparison guide,” or “book a demo”? These actions signal a deeper interest than a simple click.

Case in point: productivity platform Notion measures campaign success by the percentage of users who return within 48 hours and engage with its app. This behavioural metric predicts subscription growth better than click-through rates.

Workflow automation giant Zapier focuses on completing flows, ensuring users actually build and run automated workflows rather than just form submissions. These companies have realised that conversion is a journey, not a single click.

2. Prioritise the Content Path Over the Click Path

In the past, we judged ads by their ability to drive immediate clicks. But in a privacy-first world, the content path, the sequence of resources a prospect consumes before converting, matters more than the initial source.

Research shows that more than 70% of a buyer’s journey is completed before they ever contact a vendor. 

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That journey happens through blog posts, podcasts, webinars, community conversations and private messages that analytics tools can’t fully track.

Here’s how to optimise your content to drive engagement - 

• Rethinking the Funnel. The classic marketing funnel still applies, but its stages evolve.
• Awareness through education. Instead of pushing ads that scream “buy now,” create content that educates. How-to guides, industry benchmarks, founder stories, podcasts and webinars build trust. A brand that produces videos on training techniques or nutrition tips builds deeper loyalty than one that only shows product images.
• Interest through exploration. Once a prospect recognises a need, they explore multiple options. Your content should help them compare alternatives and evaluate fit. Interactive quizzes, product demos and comparison charts aid this stage.
• Consideration of the decision. Provide tools that help decision makers justify the purchase: ROI calculators, case studies, testimonials, and free trials. These resources reduce risk and accelerate the jump from interest to purchase.

3. Let Your Offers Drive the Funnel

Offers are the bridge between consumption and conversion. Once you’ve established trust through education, present compelling offers that pull prospects back to your site.

These offers can include:

• Exclusive discounts or bundles to encourage return visits and reduce comparison shopping.
  
  
• Value-add incentives such as free consultations, audits or training sessions.
  
  
• Community access through private Slack channels, mastermind groups or webinars.
  
  

Measure offers by redemption rates and repeat visits, not just coupon code usage.

Figma has grown its user base by offering live collaborative workshops that showcase real workflows rather than just trials. Canva and Duolingo measure success by user return frequency and feature adoption metrics that correlate with paid upgrades.

4. Build New Measurement Frameworks

In a post-attribution world, traditional metrics like CPC, CTR, and ROAS tell only part of the story. CMOs are rightly questioning inflated ROAS figures because funnel data is missing and cross device tracking is unreliable.

Instead, her’s how to create a dashboard of behavioural and business-focused metrics.

Metric

Why It Matters

Revisit rate

Tracks the percentage of users who return within a set period, indicating growing intent.

Scroll depth & page sequences

Shows how deeply visitors engage with content and whether the site flows logically.

Funnel velocity

Measures how quickly prospects move from awareness to decision.

Offer redemption

Quantifies the uptake of discounts, webinars or demos, signalling conversion readiness.

Content to conversion lag

Captures the time between content consumption and purchase, helping prioritise channels.

Repeat sessions per user

Indicates the typical number of visits required before a sale.

By focusing on these signals, you get a directionally accurate view of performance even when data is incomplete. They also help you answer key questions: what’s working and where to invest more.

Invest in First Party Data and Identity Resolution

Privacy rules don’t just remove data  they encourage better practices.

Effective attribution now starts with first party data collection. Attribution ready systems require identity resolution across touchpoints, server side tracking and deterministic matching through email or phone.

Progressive profiling  capturing data gradually as value is exchanged  allows you to connect anonymous behaviour with known customers over time. Pair this with behavioural event tracking to identify awareness, consideration, decision and purchase moments.

Cross device attribution remains a challenge. Traditional analytics tools often see the same person on desktop and mobile as two separate users.

To mitigate this, encourage log ins or account creation early and implement server side tracking that uses deterministic identifiers instead of cookies. Building your own first party data infrastructure is a long term investment but it’s the only way to gain consistent insight in a privacy compliant way.

Engineering Dark Social

Dark social isn’t a black hole to be feared; it’s a channel to be designed for. Sharing via WhatsApp, Slack or private forums carries more trust than public posts.

While you can’t track these shares directly, you can increase their likelihood by:

• Creating snackable assets such as short videos, quote graphics and how to reels.
  
  
• Optimising content for private sharing with clear titles and meta descriptions.
  
  
• Participating in communities to seed helpful content and engage in genuine discussions.
  
  
• Running attribution surveys to ask customers how they heard about you and capture peer influence.
  
  

A Phased Action Plan

Implementing these principles doesn’t happen overnight.

Month 1 - Audit and instrument
Map existing user journeys and identify where attribution breaks.
Implement server side tracking and begin collecting first party behavioural data.
Set up dashboards for revisit rates, scroll depth and offer engagement.

Month 2 - Build and test
Develop educational content assets that address common questions and share them across owned channels.
Launch offers tied to specific stages of the funnel.
Begin progressive profiling to connect anonymous sessions with user identities.

Month 3 - Optimise and scale
Analyse behavioural data to identify high intent patterns and adjust ad targeting.
Invest in community engagement and referral programmes to tap into dark social.
Run incrementality tests to measure true campaign impact.
Double down on offers and content types that show the highest conversion velocity.

By shifting from attribution obsession to behavioural observation, marketers can make smarter decisions and build paid media programmes that deliver real growth even when the data isn’t perfect.

Focus on what your audience does, understand why they do it and optimise experiences that earn attention and trust.

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