Marketing attribution statistics at a glance
| Category | Statistic | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Model adoption | 81% of organisations run attribution, 79% run MMM and 86% run incrementality testing | BCG/Google, 2025 |
| Model adoption | Only 46% use all three methods together; 40% completely trust their measurement | BCG/Google, 2025 |
| Model adoption | Google Ads has retired first click, linear, time decay and position-based; only last click and data-driven remain | Google Ads Help, 2023 |
| Confidence | 85% of marketers are confident they can measure ROI; 32% measure it holistically | Nielsen, October 2025 |
| Confidence | 52% of senior marketing leaders can prove marketing's value and get credit for it | Gartner, September 2024 |
| Confidence | 33% of marketers name measuring ROI as their single biggest challenge | HubSpot, 2026 |
| Journey | The average B2B buying cycle runs 10.1 months, down from 11.3 months in 2024 | 6sense, 2025 |
| Journey | 31 recorded touches happen before a B2B deal closes, across 192 days | Dreamdata, 2022 (dated) |
| Journey | 13 people inside the buying company and 9 outside it shape a purchase decision | Forrester, 2025 |
| Dark funnel | 61% of the buying journey is done before buyers contact a seller, down from 69% | 6sense, 2025 |
| Dark funnel | 85% of B2B buyers buy from the day-one list they had before searching | Bain & Company, 2025 |
| Dark funnel | 96% of B2B marketers expect their main campaign effects within two weeks | LinkedIn B2B Institute |
| Signal loss | Google kept third-party cookies in Chrome on 22 April 2025 and dropped the standalone prompt | Google Privacy Sandbox, 2025 |
| Signal loss | 42% of companies still have no CRM and 57% have no customer data platform | Google/BCG, 2025 |
| Computed | A single-touch model credits 3.2% of the touches in an average B2B journey | Computed from Dreamdata and 6sense |
Which attribution models do marketers actually use?
Attribution is close to universal, with 81% of organisations running some form of it, but the choice of model has narrowed sharply: Google Ads now offers only last click and data-driven attribution, and data-driven is the default.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 81% of organisations run attribution, from a study of 3,140 marketing organisations worldwide. | BCG/Google Global Measurement Study, 2025 |
| 79% run marketing mix models and 86% run incrementality testing, both higher than attribution adoption. | BCG/Google, 2025 |
| Google removed the first click, linear, time decay and position-based models from Google Ads in 2023. Last click and data-driven are the only options left, and data-driven is the default for most conversion actions. | Google Ads Help |
| Google released Meridian, an open-source marketing mix model, to every marketer in January 2025, with more than 20 certified measurement partners and hundreds of brands in testing before launch. | Google, January 2025 |
| IAB built its February 2026 State of Data report around AI applied to attribution, incrementality testing and MMM together, rather than around any single model. | IAB, February 2026 |
The story here isn't that attribution is popular. It's that MMM and incrementality testing are now more common than attribution itself, which would have been backwards five years ago. Google closing off its own rules-based models ended the last-click argument faster than a decade of blog posts, because it removed the option rather than the debate.
Can marketers actually prove marketing ROI?
About half can. Gartner found that 52% of senior marketing leaders successfully prove marketing's value and get credit for it, while Nielsen found 85% of marketers feel confident measuring ROI and only 32% actually measure it across both digital and traditional media.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 85% of marketers say they're confident in their ability to measure ROI. 32% measure it holistically across traditional and digital channels. | Nielsen Marketing ROI Blueprint, October 2025 |
| 32% of marketers measure traditional and digital media spend holistically, from a survey of 1,400 marketers worldwide. | Nielsen 2025 Annual Marketing Report |
| 52% of senior marketing leaders said they were successful in proving marketing's value and receiving credit for it, from 378 leaders surveyed in April and May 2024. | Gartner, September 2024 |
| Leaders using two or more high-complexity metric types were up to 1.8 times more likely to prove value and get credit than leaders who used none of them. | Gartner, 2024 |
| 84% of companies are stuck in a brand measurement loop where underfunded measurement leads to unclear impact, then to scepticism and tighter budgets, from 426 senior marketing leaders surveyed in September and October 2025. | Gartner, June 2026 |
| 33% of marketers name measuring the ROI of marketing activity as their top challenge, ahead of keeping up with trends (29.8%) and generating leads (29.6%), from 1,500+ global marketers. | HubSpot 2026 State of Marketing |
| 19.5% say adopting a data-driven strategy is one of their biggest challenges, and 12.4% struggle to share data across their organisation. | HubSpot, 2026 |
| 33% of B2B marketers struggle with measuring content effectiveness, from 1,015 B2B marketers surveyed between 24 June and 14 August 2025. | Content Marketing Institute, 2026 |
| Only one in four marketers is satisfied with how their organisation uses data to power personalised engagement, from nearly 4,500 marketers worldwide. | Salesforce State of Marketing, tenth edition |
Two numbers in that table disagree by 53 points. Marketers are confident, and marketers are not audited, which is why 85% survives a board meeting and 32% is what would survive an analyst. Gartner's 1.8x finding is the practical one: teams that prove value aren't the ones with the best single model, they're the ones running more than one kind of metric at once.
How long is a B2B buying journey, and how many touches does it take?
The average B2B buying cycle runs 10.1 months and produces 31 recorded touches per account, which works out at one tracked touch roughly every six days.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| The average B2B buying cycle is 10.1 months in 2025, down from 11.3 months in 2024, from just under 4,000 buyers surveyed. | 6sense B2B Buyer Experience Report, 2025 |
| Each buyer records 16 interactions with the winning vendor, against 17 in 2024 and 16 in 2023. Buying teams average more than 10 people. | 6sense, 2025 |
| The average B2B customer journey takes 192 days from anonymous first touch to closed won, from anonymised data across 414 active accounts. | Dreamdata, 2022 (dated) |
| 31 touches happen before the average B2B deal closes. The lowest-touch segment, B2B media, still runs about 15 touches, roughly 50% below that average. | Dreamdata, 2022 (dated) |
| Dreamdata's LinkedIn Ads benchmarks put the average first touch to revenue at 272 days, with 6.8 stakeholders per purchase. | Dreamdata |
| An average of 13 people inside the buying organisation and 9 from outside it are involved in a purchase decision, and 73% of purchases involve three or more departments. | Forrester Buyers' Journey Survey, 2025 |
The Dreamdata numbers are from 2022 and I'm keeping them because nothing public has replaced them at that level of detail. Treat 31 touches as a floor, not a ceiling: the buying group has grown since, and 6sense's 16 interactions per person across a 10-person team implies a far higher account total. Whatever number you pick, the arithmetic that matters is the same. One touch out of 31 is 3.2%, and that's the share of the journey a last-click report is describing when it tells you where a deal came from.
How much of the buying journey happens where attribution can't see it?
Roughly 61% of it. That's the share of the B2B journey buyers complete before they contact a seller, and it excludes the peer conversations, communities and private research that never touch a tracked property at all.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 61% of the buying journey is complete before buyers make first contact with a seller, down from 69% in 2024. | 6sense, 2025 |
| 94% of buying groups put their shortlist in preference order before they engage a seller, and whoever leads after the selection phase wins 77% of the time. The vendor contacted first still takes about eight deals in ten. | 6sense, 2025 |
| 79% of first contacts with a vendor are initiated by the buyer, down from 82% in prior years. | 6sense, 2025 |
| 85% of B2B buyers purchase from their day-one list: the vendors they already had in mind before they searched. | Bain & Company, 2025 |
| Click-through rates have fallen by as much as 30% in some categories including B2B software since Google introduced AI-generated summaries, cutting the search visibility that fed attribution in the first place. | Bain & Company, 2025 |
| 95% of potential B2B buyers aren't ready to buy today. 80% of companies change banking services only once every five years, so only a sliver of any category is in market at a given moment. | LinkedIn B2B Institute with Ehrenberg-Bass |
| 96% of B2B marketers expect to see the main effects of a campaign within two weeks. | LinkedIn B2B Institute |
| 94% of B2B buyers use large language models during research, a channel that leaves no referrer for most attribution tools. | 6sense, 2025 |
Read two of those numbers together: 96% of B2B marketers expect campaign effects within two weeks, and the average buying cycle is 10.1 months. That is a 20-fold mismatch between the reporting window and the decision window, and no model fixes it. It's also why self-reported attribution keeps coming back. A "how did you hear about us" field is crude, and it's the only instrument that can hear a podcast, a Slack group or a colleague's recommendation.
What did cookie deprecation actually do to attribution?
Less than the industry braced for. Google announced on 22 April 2025 that it would keep third-party cookies in Chrome and drop the planned standalone prompt, ending six years of expected deprecation, and the real damage to attribution turned out to be missing internal plumbing rather than missing cookies.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Google confirmed on 22 April 2025 that Chrome would keep its existing third-party cookie choice in settings and would not roll out a new standalone prompt. IP Protection shipped in Incognito in Q3 2025. | Google Privacy Sandbox, April 2025 |
| Global consent to app tracking under Apple's App Tracking Transparency reached 50%, a 10% increase since the April 2021 rollout. France sits just under 51% and Germany at 47%. | AppsFlyer, April 2025 |
| 42% of companies worldwide still have no CRM platform and 57% have no customer data platform, from a survey of 2,135 marketing decision-makers. | Google/BCG Path to AI Excellence, 2025 |
| Only 24% of organisations have a 360-degree view of their customers, and 29% of marketers report limited data availability. | Google/BCG, 2025 |
The cookie apocalypse got cancelled and almost nobody updated their slides. Chrome still carries third-party cookies, and ATT opt-in went up. If your attribution is worse than it was in 2021, the cause is more likely the 42% statistic: no CRM, no CDP, no join between ad data and revenue. That's a plumbing problem with a budget attached, less exciting than a privacy crisis and much more fixable.
Are marketing mix modelling and incrementality testing replacing attribution?
They aren't replacing it, they're being stacked on top of it. 46% of organisations now run attribution, incrementality testing and MMM at the same time, and eight in ten of those plan to use all three more.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 46% of organisations use attribution, incrementality testing and MMM concurrently. Eight in ten of them intend to increase their use of all three. | BCG/Google Global Measurement Study, 2025 |
| Only 40% of global organisations completely trust the performance of their current measurement solutions, from 3,140 respondents. | BCG/Google, 2025 |
| 72% of analytics professionals frequently use AI within their measurement work, and 76% of leading organisations use AI to pull lessons from campaigns. | Google/BCG, 2025 |
| Marketing budgets sit at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, barely up from 7.7% in 2025, from 401 CMOs surveyed between January and March 2026. | Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey |
Attribution tells you which touches were involved, incrementality tells you which spend caused something, and MMM tells you what the whole portfolio did. They answer different questions, so running one and calling it measurement was always the mistake. The gap worth watching is 86% adoption of incrementality testing against 40% trust in measurement overall. Adoption is easy, and a test nobody acts on is just a slide.
How we calculated the original numbers
Four figures on this page don't appear anywhere else. Here's the arithmetic, so you can check it or change the inputs.
- 3.2%: the share of a B2B journey a single-touch model can credit. Dreamdata's 2022 benchmark recorded an average of 31 touches before a B2B deal closes, across 414 accounts. A last-click or first-click model gives 100% of the credit to one of those touches, so it describes 1 / 31 = 3.2% of the journey. Cross-check it against 6sense's 2025 survey, where each buyer records 16 interactions with the winning vendor: one touch out of 16 is 6.3%. The honest range is 3% to 6%, and both ends are small. No published segment averages fewer than 15 touches, so effectively every B2B journey has more than three, and single-touch models mis-describe all of them.
- 6.2 months: the invisible stretch of the average B2B buying cycle. 6sense puts the 2025 buying cycle at 10.1 months and says 61% of it is complete before buyers contact a seller. 10.1 x 0.61 = 6.16 months. On the same maths, 2024 was 11.3 x 0.69 = 7.8 months, so the invisible window shrank by about 1.6 months in a year. It's still more than half a year in which the buyer is deciding and your CRM holds nothing.
- 53 points: the gap between ROI confidence and ROI measurement. Nielsen found 85% of marketers confident in their ability to measure ROI and 32% measuring it holistically across digital and traditional media, a gap of 53 percentage points. Widen the base and the ratio holds: average the two "actually measured" figures, Nielsen's 32% and Gartner's 52% who prove value and get credit, and you get 42%, against Nielsen's 85% who say they're confident. 85 / 42 = 2.0. Confidence runs at about twice measured capability.
- 4.9 recorded touches per account per month. Dreamdata's 2022 figure of 31 touches over a 192-day journey is 4.9 touches per 30.4-day month, or one every 6.2 days. Per person, 6sense's 16 interactions over 10.1 months is 1.6 a month. The units differ: Dreamdata counts digital touches on an account, 6sense counts interactions a buyer remembers. Read them as bookends around a rhythm of roughly one touch a week, per account, for most of a year.
What the 2026 numbers actually say
Attribution isn't broken, it's just small. Every credible dataset says the same thing: a B2B purchase runs 10 months, pulls in 13 people inside the buying company and 9 outside it, and produces dozens of touches. Any model that assigns a deal to one of them is answering a question nobody asked. The useful move isn't a better model, it's a portfolio: 46% of organisations now run attribution, incrementality and MMM together, and that's the group I'd bet on.
The confidence gap is the real story. 85% say they can measure ROI, 32% do it across all their media, and 52% can prove value to their own executives. That spread is not a measurement problem, it's a governance problem. Gartner's finding that two or more high-complexity metric types make you 1.8 times more likely to get credit says the fix is boring and available: measure more than one way, and say which way you measured.
Stop blaming the cookie. Google kept third-party cookies in Chrome in April 2025 and ATT opt-in climbed to 50%. Meanwhile 42% of companies have no CRM and 57% have no CDP. The gap between marketing spend and revenue in most companies isn't a privacy casualty, it's an unbuilt data join. Fix the plumbing first, then argue about models.
FAQ
What percentage of marketers use multi-touch attribution?
81% of organisations run attribution of some kind, and 46% run it alongside incrementality testing and marketing mix modelling, according to the BCG/Google Global Measurement Study of 3,140 organisations (2025). No current public survey splits those attribution users cleanly into single-touch and multi-touch camps, so treat any precise split you see quoted as vendor marketing rather than measured data.
How accurate is last-click attribution?
A last-click model credits one of the 31 recorded touches in an average B2B journey, which is 3.2% of it (computed from Dreamdata's 2022 benchmark of 414 accounts). Using 6sense's 2025 figure of 16 interactions per buyer instead gives 6.3%. Either way, the model is describing a small single-digit share of what actually happened.
How much of the B2B buying journey happens before sales gets involved?
61% of it, according to 6sense's 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report of just under 4,000 buyers, down from 69% in 2024. Applied to the 10.1-month average cycle, that's about 6.2 months of decision-making completed before a seller hears from the buyer.
Did third-party cookie deprecation break marketing attribution?
No. Google announced on 22 April 2025 that Chrome would keep third-party cookies and drop the standalone prompt, and Apple's ATT opt-in rate rose to 50% globally (AppsFlyer, April 2025). The bigger measurement gap is internal: 42% of companies have no CRM and 57% have no customer data platform (Google/BCG, 2025).
Can most marketers prove marketing ROI?
About half. Gartner found 52% of senior marketing leaders successfully prove marketing's value and get credit for it (September 2024), while Nielsen found 85% feel confident measuring ROI but only 32% measure it holistically across digital and traditional media (October 2025).
Is marketing mix modelling replacing multi-touch attribution?
No. 79% of organisations run MMM and 86% run incrementality testing, both above the 81% who run attribution, but only 46% run all three together (BCG/Google, 2025). The three answer different questions, and the teams that prove value tend to run more than one.
Sources
- BCG/Google Global Measurement Study and Google/BCG Path to AI Excellence, via Think with Google (2025, N=3,140 and N=2,135)
- Nielsen, The Marketing ROI Blueprint (October 2025)
- Nielsen, 2025 Annual Marketing Report (2025, 1,400 marketers)
- Gartner, Only 52% of Senior Marketing Leaders Can Prove Marketing's Value (September 2024, 378 leaders)
- Gartner, Marketing Survey Finds 84% of Companies Are Stuck in a Brand Doom Loop (June 2026, 426 leaders)
- Gartner, 2026 CMO Spend Survey (May 2026, 401 CMOs)
- HubSpot, 2026 State of Marketing (2026, 1,500+ marketers)
- 6sense, The B2B Buyer Experience Report for 2025 (2025, just under 4,000 buyers)
- Forrester, Three Realities About B2B Buying Networks (2025, Buyers' Journey Survey)
- Dreamdata, B2B go-to-market benchmarks (2022, 414 accounts)
- Dreamdata, The B2B customer journey (LinkedIn Ads benchmarks)
- Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content and Marketing Trends: Insights for 2026 (2026, 1,015 B2B marketers)
- Bain & Company, Losing Control: How Zero-Click Search Affects B2B Marketers (2025)
- LinkedIn B2B Institute with Ehrenberg-Bass, The 95-5 Rule
- Google Privacy Sandbox, Next steps for Privacy Sandbox and tracking protections in Chrome (April 2025)
- Google Ads Help, About attribution models
- Google, Meridian is now available to everyone (January 2025)
- AppsFlyer, Mobile Ad Market Thrives Four Years After ATT (April 2025)
- Salesforce, State of Marketing Report, tenth edition (nearly 4,500 marketers)
- IAB, State of Data 2026: The AI-Powered Measurement Transformation (February 2026)
Methodology. Numbers were collected in September 2026 and checked against the original publisher's page, not against other statistics roundups. Every figure comes from a publicly published report; no employer or private platform data was used. Vendor claims without a stated sample or method were excluded as unsourced. That is why two figures which circulate widely in attribution roundups, "88 touchpoints" and "63% of marketers cannot prove ROI", do not appear here: neither traces back to a published study with a sample, so this page does not repeat them. A well-known vendor attribution survey was dropped during review for the same reason, because the page carrying it states neither a sample size nor a fielding year. Dreamdata's benchmark is from 2022 and is labelled dated everywhere it appears, since nothing public has replaced it at that level of detail. The Dreamdata figures come from Dreamdata's own public benchmark pages, both linked in full. Gartner blocks automated fetching, so its press releases were checked against publisher mirrors of the same releases. Last updated 8 September 2026.