Content Attribution Is Rigged

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If you feel like your content program isn't getting the credit it deserves, you're not crazy.

The dirty secret of marketing is that content attribution is often rigged, which tricks us into investing in our worst content.

Let me give you an example. Over the past few years, content has bifurcated inside many marketing orgs. Brand/content teams are responsible for social and thought leadership content, while growth marketing/demand gen teams get SEO. Many growth marketers will admit that they don't care that much about storytelling or craft. Good content is the stuff that makes the line graph go up.?

As a result, most content created by growth marketers is recycled "educational" content that’s blander than British hospital food — it's commoditized and designed to answer a long-tail search query like “how to measure content marketing ROI.” There’s a 50/50 chance AI wrote it, but most people at your company will see it and think, “Fine.” The H2s are in all the right places. It uses the right keywords and even calls out your target audience by name! It’s inoffensive so long as you don’t read it closely.

Most content created by growth marketers is recycled BS that’s blander than British hospital food.

Unlike content and brand marketers, growth marketers do an excellent job of setting this content up for success —?programming it to get attribution. For instance, until the content piece ranks organically, the demand gen team will pay for it to appear as a Google search ad. When a prospect clicks on that content, they’ll get put in an ad retargeting campaign. It doesn’t matter if the prospect thought “bleh” when they tried to read the content? — they demonstrated their interest in the topic, and now they’ll get stalked by relevant retargeting ads. (And nurture emails, if they filled out a form to get said shitty content.)?

If this user eventually converts because they’re a relevant prospect and you’ve been stalking them for a while, the bleh content will get first-touch attribution for the conversion. It’s designed to get credit even if it didn’t contribute past tricking a prospect into clicking on a headline.?

Compare that to a scenario in which the content team ghostwrote a founder's viral, long-form LinkedIn thought leadership post that engaged hundreds of prospective clients, leading to an influx of leads. Unless those prospects explicitly self-report that they heard about you from that thought leadership content AND that self-reporting somehow makes it into Hubspot, that great content will get as much credit for the conversion as the office dog.?

That’s because the most influential thought leadership content thrives in third-party channels where our audience spends their time; it’s untrackable, trapped in the dark funnel where 80% of marketing effectiveness resides. Even if your CEO and CFO understand the dark funnel, the last decade has made most B2B leaders allergic to investing in anything that doesn't have hard attribution data to back it up.

The data does lie

This is the part of the newsletter where I give all the caveats: some demand gen teams care about quality content, and even if they don't, I don't blame them for setting their programs up to get maximum credit. As a marketing leader, I want people who get attribution on my team. On the flip side, content and brand marketers have put themselves at a disadvantage by not caring as much about attribution.

But let's also acknowledge the cognitive dissonance at play.

We love to say, “The data doesn’t lie!” when we secretly know the marketing and sales data is almost always lying. Over the past decade, data has become a false prophet we use to justify our decisions and shield ourselves from blame. If it works, we're data-driven geniuses; if it doesn't, we're blameless — we were just listening to the data. As a result, we’ve lost the guts to do anything not backed up by attribution.?

We love to say, “The data doesn’t lie!” when we secretly know in marketing and sales that the data is almost always lying.

Our worst content gets all the glory, and our best content gets none. We keep pumping money into creating mind-numbing SEO content, even though we can see that search is whithering as GenAI slowly poisons its oatmeal with arsenic.?

This is why so much B2B marketing is joyless and grey.?

This is why so many content and brand marketers seem deeply depressed.

I’d say the solution is to give up our collective delusion that data is unimpeachable and holy, but that will never happen. In truth, we creative marketers need to get off our asses and figure out how to rig the attribution game, too. We need to secure more paid budget for thought leadership content and integrate it into trackable retargeting campaigns. We need to match prospects who engage with content on third-party social channels to closed-won deals. We need to finally learn how Hubspot works.?If we don't, things will only get worse in the AI age.

Isn’t that just fighting bullshit with bullshit? Sure, but if we do it well, we can finally get back to telling great stories.

P.S. If you want to share this sentiment with people who don't like to read, here's me ranting about this with Joshua Ritchie on the Best Story Wins podcast.

3 Links

This Labor Day, Let's Consider How We Want Technology to Work For Us (Blood in the Machine): Reading Brian Merchant's pro-worker takes on AI keeps me honest.

Why AI Isn't Going to Make Art (The New Yorker): Inject this into my veins.

Falling (Hadley Franklin): One of my oldest friends, Hadley, won the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize with this incredible story.

I'm the head of Marketing at A.Team and best-selling co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Click the subscribe button above to join 150k+ marketers who read this newsletter for lessons on the art & science of storytelling in the AI Age.