The Illusion of First-Touch Attribution If a CEO asks their marketing team, "Where did our last $100k deal come from?", the standard answer derived from Google Analytics is usually something misleading like "Direct Traffic" or "Organic Search." This is fundamentally flawed. In a complex B2B sales cycle spanning 6 to 12 months with a dozen stakeholder touches, looking at the very first or very last click provides a dangerously incomplete picture. Relying on simplistic attribution models like First-Click or Last-Click will cause you to aggressively underfund your most impactful brand channels and overfund bottom-of-funnel capture mechanisms like Branded Google Ads. --- The Crisis of "Dark Social" The vast majority of B2B buying decisions are now made in places that marketing tracking software physically cannot see. This is called Dark Social. Examples of Dark Social: A Slack channel exclusively for SaaS founders. A private Discord server for Revenue Operations executives