B2B lead generation
Long consideration window
Browser storage is measured in weeks and a considered B2B purchase is measured in months, so the record of the first touch is routinely gone before the revenue it produced ever appears.
Paid, fixed scope · Within ten business days after complete access
What breaks
Considered purchases with months between first touch and close, committee buying, multiple contacts from one account, and any deal longer than a browser will remember
Attribution installed in a browser has a shelf life shorter than the sales cycle it is being asked to measure. Storage set client-side is capped well below the length of a considered purchase, and buyers change devices, or hand the evaluation to a colleague who was never touched by the campaign at all. By the time a deal closes, the identifier that would connect it to its origin has expired, or belongs to a different browser, or belongs to a different person on the same account. What survives is the last thing that happened, which is usually a branded search or a direct visit, so long-cycle revenue reliably credits itself to the bottom of the funnel.
Why nobody catches it
The distortion is systematic rather than random, so the reports stay internally consistent year over year and look stable rather than broken. Brand and direct always appear to be the efficient channels, and the spend that generates the awareness those channels harvest always appears to be the expensive one. Cutting it produces no immediate change, because the deals already in the pipeline continue to close, and the effect surfaces two or three cycles later with no obvious cause and nobody looking for one.
The work
First touch stored on the durable record, the measured length of the real sales cycle, and a channel report on a window that matches it.
- 01Move the record of first touch off the browser and onto the account or contact record, where it lasts as long as the deal does
- 02Join on the account rather than the individual, so a colleague joining the evaluation late does not read as a new origin
- 03Report on a window that matches the real sales cycle, measured from the data rather than assumed
- 04Keep both first touch and most recent touch and report them side by side, rather than choosing one and arguing about it
Elsewhere in lead generation and crm
One stack usually has more than one of these.
These boundaries compound. A brand running a hosted checkout and a subscription plan has two separate reasons for its channel report to be wrong, and fixing one leaves the other in place. The audit establishes which are live on your stack before anything gets rebuilt.
Start with the smallest useful check
Send one account running long sales cycles and we will read its setup before anyone signs anything.
Send the domain, the customer journey, and the platforms that should receive it. The tracking audit shows what is working, what is missing or duplicated, and the exact build recommended next.
Paid, fixed scope · Within ten business days after complete access