The problem
Senior leadership believed the sales team drove everything. Web influence was dismissed as minor.
Meanwhile, the company was spending on PPC in keyword areas where competitors already owned the organic results — and had no way to prove what any channel actually produced. Without a way to trace revenue back to its source, every conversation about marketing's contribution turned into an argument about credit rather than a discussion backed by data.
The approach
Capture all attribution data upfront — in session storage and cookies — then send it downstream into backend, server-side databases. Link the front end to the back end, and link the back end to invoice revenue and the customer record. The goal: know how many new customers marketing is producing, and how many existing customers it's influencing.
The implementation
A script on the site captures UTM campaign parameters and any other marketing information available at the time of the visit, storing it in dedicated browser storage. An anonymous identifier is created that expires after a year, along with a separate ID for each session. First-touch cookies are added for the campaigns that brought a visitor in originally, persisting for one to two years.
The result is that later, when analyzing campaign performance, you have both the transaction (last-touch) campaign and the first-touch campaign to work with — not just whichever channel happened to close the deal.
Once the major revenue-producing KPIs in the customer experience are identified, those marketing attributes get linked to each one and stored in the backend database alongside them.
The hard part: mapping the journey
The trouble is identifying every place in the customer journey where revenue actually gets produced. It might be a lead form. An online transaction. An application to sign up. An application for a credit account. A phone call. The business has to think creatively about its own customer journey to apply this to each type of customer KPI — and it has to come to grips with the idea that its influence is largely driven from the web, which not every leadership team is prepared to accept.
Starting with PPC
Once the tracking infrastructure is in place, attribution can start with PPC specifically. Paid search is often dismissed as bottom-of-funnel and somehow less important — but a simple review of the search landscape usually reveals keyword areas where the company is weak organically and a competitor is strong. That's a straightforward opportunity: spend more in the areas where you're currently invisible to the potential customer audience, measure last-touch attribution there, and use the first-touch campaign values already being captured to begin measuring lift across every KPI already mapped.
This approach works for both B2B and B2C, but it's particularly effective in B2B lead generation — long cycles, multiple touches, and a sales team that's certain it closed the deal on its own. The attribution chain shows the web's actual role in creating and warming the lead before anyone ever picked up the phone.
The result
The company built something that could genuinely help it scale — a system that ties invoice revenue and customer IDs back to the marketing channels that drove them, showing the full journey rather than a last-click guess. The remaining work was convincing senior leadership of that reality, which only happens by putting the data in front of them: revenue, by channel, by customer, over time.