(Note: Our blogs are not written by GenAI).
You have built your B2B Attribution Report.
Congratulations! You are already ahead of most of your peer companies. Your Attribution report will go to a slide in the marketing review deck. It gets nodded at. Then it disappears into… history.
Let us get deeper into how you can make your Attribution efforts something more than an “FYI” slide.
Why Attribution Alone Rarely Drives Action
Attribution reports do show impact of marketing channels on the pipeline, but not efficiency. Without incorporating costs, attribution exercise answers the wrong question.
You want to move from:
“Which channels most helped create our pipeline” to
” Which channels created our pipeline more efficiently”.
Decisions made from Attribution alone often reinforce existing bias, such as:
- Paid channels look powerful
- Website channels create pipeline on their own
- Brand and Corporate Marketing spend is wasted money
Step One Toward Real Decisions: Bring in Program Costs
More advanced B2B teams take the next step – they layer in program costs into attribution to calculate ROI.
I want to acknowledge here that even program costs are hard enough to allocate accurately. Tracking mechanisms for this typically are not in place or not used. Another aspect to consider is how to allocate Corporate and Brand spend (this could be about 20-30% of Program costs – and contribute to most of your awesome “contact us” leads).
Suppose you overcome this hurdle and incorporate program costs. Then insights from Attribution will improve. You start discovering things like:
- Paid channels look much worse if you consider costs
- Emails and Webinars look great (because their program costs are small)
The insights at this stage are still sub-optimal. Even though ROI metric creates more clarity than Attribution alone, it does not tell the full story.
The Biggest Blind Spot in B2B ROI: Headcount Costs
For most B2B marketing organizations, 40-60% of total marketing cost is people, not programs.
And that cost is not evenly distributed.
Headcount costs are disproportionately consumed by channels with little or no media spend – like Email, Content, Website, Webinars, and Internal Events.
Without incorporating headcount costs, returns from “organic” channels will be inflated.
In reality, a channel with $0 program spend can be one of the most expensive channels in the organization once you account for people.
Until headcount costs are included, ROI metric is fundamentally misleading.
Why Almost No Company Considers Headcount (And Why That’s a Mistake)
If allocating Program costs are tricky as discussed before, allocating Headcount costs is much worse. It feels political, subjective, and time-consuming. If you soldier through and do this, you will always get criticism because there is always something to pick on.
As a result, most companies settle for either partial ROI (i.e. only with program costs) or no ROI at all,
The result is decisions built on incomplete economics.
Directional ROI Beats Perfect ROI
Successful B2B marketing leaders know that Attribution and ROI are decision tools, not accounting statements. Directional accuracy, applied consistently, is far more valuable than waiting for the perfect numbers. Essentially you are trying to answer the following:
- What should we double down on
- What should we cut
- What should we rethink?
What Changes When You see “True” ROI
Once costs – including headcount – are incorporated, several patterns consistently emerge across B2B organizations:
- Paid Search Underperforms on True ROI: While Paid Search creates large lead volumes, big portion of these is junk, and the actual pipeline created is small compared to the costs. Once costs are included, this channel ranks among the worst. A typical B2B company can cut Paid Search spend by one-third or half and reallocate it to better channels with minimal adverse impact in the short-term and high benefits in the long term.
- Website and Content are the Real ROI Engines: These channels outperform when measured holistically, even after allocating for high proportion of Corporate/Brand program costs and headcount costs. We recommend human-generated, experience-driven, opinionated content (You should resist AI Slop – nobody, not even machines, will read it).
- Email and Webinars Excel at Mid-Funnel, not Acquisition: These channels are best at educating, advancing interest, and supporting sales cycles.
- Executive Events are Expensive but Worth It: Close, high-trust interactions matter in B2B deals, especially late in the funnel.
- Tradeshows are more for Branding than Lead Gen: This channel rarely win in terms of ROI. The leads generated tend to be not responsive. This channel should be used for branding and credibility building. However, you can make this channel more effective by insisting on speaking slots and providing easy ways to get in touch like QR codes.
From Attribution to Confident Decision Making
While Attribution tells you what happened, comprehensive ROI help you decide what to do next. When you combine Attribution with costs – program and headcount – mixed with judgement, you get something truly valuable: Confident Decision Making.
Alloc AI Makes Cost-Inclusive ROI Practical
Alloc AI allocates Program and Headcount costs with help of AI with minimum input required from you. You can provide few inputs like total Marketing program budget and marketing headcount and Alloc AI will create allocation informed by AI. (Of course, you can provide more inputs if available and the output will be even better). You can override the Alloc AI allocations using your judgement upload revised reports back to Alloc AI for even more accurate calculations and recommendations. The result is a dependable, decision-ready view of ROI. Get more information at www.AllocAI.io.
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