Our teams are built to guide the customer together. Our reporting makes them compete against each other, and it costs the business.
Marketing teams are built with a mix of functional experts (Content, Field, Brand) and channel specialists (PPC, Social, CRM). We hire these people to work together, to guide the customer from awareness to continued loyalty, each function playing a distinct role in the cycle.
But there's a tension that stops them from being a collaborative force: every team has to prove its contribution as an isolated unit. And when each team is focused on the revenue their stage of the funnel drives, they're working against the journey they're all supposed to be building together.
That's the gap we sat down with Santiago Melluso, Co-Founder and CEO of TakeFortyTwo, a digital commerce and marketing automation agency, to explore.
His takeaway:
"A good report is not the dashboard, but the lateral thinking patterns you can extract from it."
Attribution, in other words, isn't about distributing trophies. It's about finding signals—understanding what messaging and sequences move people, so teams have something better to work with than a price reduction.
When measurement shapes behavior
Some of the most valuable marketing work is the hardest to count. An SEO article that drives thousands of impressions but no direct conversions. Brand awareness built through social or a co-marketing stunt that goes entirely uncredited.
So teams face a constant choice: invest in what resonates with customers, or invest in what gets counted. Over time, the measurement system starts to shape the work. And when it shapes it for long enough, teams stop building the narrative and context and start relying on discounts.
While adoption of multi-touch attribution varies dramatically, from 73% at enterprises to just 38–44% at mid-market firms, the challenge isn't access to better tools. It's that the measurement system rewards last-touch behavior, and teams follow the incentive.
Let's trace a realistic omnichannel journey. A customer discovers your brand via an Instagram ad—"20% off your first order." They sign up on your site and receive their discount code. They abandon their cart and get a follow-up, "Your discount expires soon." Finally, they click on a Google Shopping ad and convert.
Paid media drove the first click and the final ad. CRM nurtured the lead in between. But because these teams operate in silos, the customer was handed a discount at every single touchpoint.
The last discount might not have even been necessary. Someone who'd been through that entire journey was already going to convert. The discount just happened to be the last thing that occurred before they did what they were going to do anyway.
A last-click dashboard can't tell the difference between what caused the conversion and what happened to precede it. So the discount gets the credit, the budget follows the credit, and the cycle continues.
As we know from brands like Gap, over-discounting hurts brand equity. Gap spent decades running near-constant promotions until customers refused to pay full price. But the more important question is how brands get there. It's rarely a strategic decision. It's the result of siloed team goals.
Growth and strategy expert Santiago Melluso sees this symptom constantly.
"Siloed teams are inadvertently trained to pursue just what’s expected from them, without factoring in what the colleagues across the hall need. If my goal is to reach a target number of net new sales I’ll run for it, even if I use tactics that leave money on the table.
A symptom we see all the time is when acquisition teams push hard for discounts and promos, at the risk of disturbing the perception of the brand and the margin of the sale.
In the end, that tension between sales and marketing, or between activation and brand-building strategies (see Binet & Field), is always lurking. Siloed revenue attribution is a sign of siloed information and siloed understanding of what the company needs."
The signal the dashboard is missing
Last-click attribution tells you which touchpoint preceded the conversion. It doesn’t tell you which message planted the idea. Which sequence built enough trust that the final click felt like a natural next step rather than a cold transaction.
Whether the Instagram ad worked because of its offer or because of how it framed the product. Whether the SMS brought the customer back because of its timing or its copy.
The invisible version of this problem is what Santiago calls “invisible ROI”:
"Say you grow your email’s performance 10x. Better content, more experiments, improved personalization. But you barely get any conversions. Looking at channel attribution you could assume it’s a failure. But who says you’re not getting more purchases in hard to attribute channels? Marketplaces, brick and mortar, distributors.
The only way to evaluate the channel is by measuring success across your entire strategy. And this requires finding correlations between those channels, and working hard to objectively prove the causation."
The email program wasn’t failing; it was building the context. But because that signal was invisible on a last-click dashboard, the team had no way to defend their contribution to the journey.
This kind of disconnected performance tracking ends up hurting the big picture.
“The more disconnected they are, the more they hide. An attribution model in 2026 needs to do more than report figures. It has to surface trends and connect to financial outcomes.”
— Santiago Melluso
This is the real cost of siloed measurement—not wasted budget, but wasted intelligence. Every customer journey is full of signals about what’s resonating, what’s building preference, what’s doing work that doesn’t show up in a click. The current model throws most of it away.
What each measurement model actually produces
Finding the signal: three foundations
The shift from scorekeeping to signal-finding starts with a different question. Not “Which channel got the credit?” but “What did this campaign, this sequence, this message teach us about what our customers respond to, and how do we apply that across everything we say and do?”
According to Santiago, getting there requires three foundations:
"Each case is different, but some concepts are essential starters:
- 1. Rework the performance data architecture.
- 2. Set a better, tailored framework for analysis including insights from every team.
- 3. Review positioning. The wrong one always gets in the way of sales.
With those solid foundations, we help [businesses] create a roadmap to improve tactical execution. The goal is to be experimental by design, to stay sharp and challenge assumptions before concluding something is working or not."
You won't always be able to prove causation from a single test. The discipline is in the iteration, not the dashboard.
Test journeys, not touchpoints
Being experimental by design doesn’t mean running more A/B tests on email subject lines or ad creative. Your teams already know how to optimize a channel. The challenge is that legacy dashboards trap talented marketers into micro-optimizations—testing for clicks, open rates, and immediate ROAS—rather than macro-optimizations that impact the P&L.
When you shift from siloed channel tracking to cross-touchpoint tracking, the nature of what your team can test fundamentally changes. You graduate from scorekeeping to true signal-finding:
- From channel competition to sequence impact: Legacy tracking pits Email against Paid Social to see which channel "won." Journey tracking lets you evaluate the entire path. Does an audience that receives top-of-funnel brand content before a promotional offer yield a 20% higher Average Order Value? Or better yet, if you withhold that bottom-of-funnel promotional SMS entirely (a cross-channel holdout), do they convert anyway? You stop asking, “Which channel got the click?” and start asking, “Which sequence of touches builds the most profitable customer, and where can we save our margin?”
- From Campaign ROAS to Cohort LTV: Legacy tracking celebrates the channel that drove the most immediate revenue today. Journey tracking lets you evaluate that exact cohort six months later. Did the customers acquired via that heavy-discount campaign actually stick around, or did the brand just pay a premium to acquire deal-hunters?
The insight you are looking for isn’t “Email B had a higher click rate.” It’s “Customers who experienced Sequence B converted at a higher rate, retained longer, and spent more.”
This is the alternative to reaching for a discount. It’s elevating your team's testing from “What gets the click?” to “What actually builds a better, more profitable customer?”
The goal is to give every specialist access to the signal that makes their judgment sharper, and gives them something to bring to leadership besides a discount.
Conclusion
When the only thing the dashboard rewards is the final click, the only lever that consistently produces a final click is a better offer. And a brand that competes on offer, over time, stops being a brand.
The question isn't “Which channel deserves the credit?” but “What is this journey telling us about what our customers actually respond to, and how do we use that to build something that lasts?”
That intelligence is available in every customer journey. Most teams just don’t have the visibility to read it.
Two steps to get there:
Step 1: Map the journey. Before you can find signal in your measurement, you need clarity on what the journey actually looks like. Brevo’s Customer Journey Mapping Guide covers every stage from discovery to loyalty—with two free templates (Miro board + Google Sheet) and expert advice from Santiago Melluso and agency partners.→ Access the free guide and templates
Step 2: Measure the journey. Once the journey is mapped, Brevo’s multichannel conversion engine connects every touchpoint to results. Define the outcomes that matter—purchases, meetings booked, deals created, custom events—and see exactly which channels, campaigns, and sequences are driving them. The signal is there. This helps surface it.→ Explore Brevo’s conversion tracking
About the expert
Santiago Melluso is Co-Founder and CEO of TakeFortyTwo, a digital commerce and marketing automation agency. He specializes in growth strategy and data-driven marketing, with experience helping brands optimize their customer acquisition and retention across multiple channels. He is also a contributing expert in Brevo's Guide to Customer Journey Mapping.
