For years, attribution has been the measuring stick performance marketers leaned on to validate campaign success. Click-throughs, last-touch credit, view-through conversions — these metrics gave the illusion of clarity in a fragmented landscape. They made it possible for growth teams to feel confident in allocating budgets and optimizing campaigns.

But as user journeys have become more complex and privacy regulations have stripped away the identifiers attribution relied on, the flaws in this model are harder to ignore. Attribution was never built to answer the most important question in performance marketing: Did this campaign actually drive incremental value?

The Pitfalls of Traditional Attribution (Guest Perspective from INCRMNTAL)

We invited our partners at INCRMNTAL to share their perspective on why attribution is broken and what marketers should know about its limitations. Here is a guest perspective from CEO and Co-founder, Maor Sadra.

Traditional Attribution: When Right can be Wrong

Marketers love numbers! Not because they are math geeks, but because numbers make them feel like they’re in control. Attribution is a master in generating numbers that look like they make sense, even when they are totally wrong. Imagine launching a campaign, attribution reporting lighting up showing your campaign is driving incredible value. It’s soooo easy to be sipping our own Kool-Aid thinking we’ve cracked the code. Except we haven’t. We’ve just been handed a flattering report by a system that was built to make everyone look great. Traditional attribution isn’t measurement. It’s more like a carnival mirror that makes every channel look tall, slim, and wildly effective, no matter how wrong it actually is.


Attribution models rarely ask the one question that should be plastered across every dashboard in bold red text: would this conversion have happened anyway? Instead, they hand out credit to anything that moved, without any distinction.


Did a user accidentally click an ad, bounce, and convert three days later from a CTV campaign? Congratulations to the click. It won 100% of the credit.


Did a user get an email, ignore it, and convert via the app they already had installed? Shoutout to that email.


Attribution loves overreporting because overreporting makes everyone feel good. CMOs get to show growth, media teams hit KPIs, and platforms rake in budget like it's Black Friday. Everyone wins. Except the actual business trying to make smart decisions.



Here’s the problem with this participation trophy approach. When the last touchpoint gets 100% of the credit, you stop seeing reality. You are telling every ad platform in the world: “win credit, get more budget”. It’s not about value — it’s about credit. You think your TikTok campaign is crushing it, but it’s just tagging along for the ride with users who were already going to buy. You double down on YouTube because the view-through numbers look great, but most of those users converted because your product is actually good or because they saw a recommendation from someone they trust. Traditional attribution doesn’t measure impact. It measures presence. And presence without impact is just background noise.


Let’s not ignore the identifier dependency mess. For years, attribution platforms leaned on device IDs, cookies, and user-level tracking to create the illusion of precision. It felt advanced. Like, hey, we know exactly who clicked what and when. Except now that identifiers are becoming extinct thanks to privacy changes and user opt-outs, these models are hanging by a thread. Fingerprinting is about as scientific as tarot cards, and probabilistic matching is just a fancy way of saying “educated guess”.


It's mad to think that some marketers are still using these to make million-dollar decisions.


Then there’s multi-touch attribution fantasy. The theory is nice. Give some credit to every channel along the way. In practice, it’s like letting everyone who touched the ball in a football game claim the touchdown. Multi-touch doesn’t fix the problem. It just spreads the BS more evenly. And it creates this weird incentive structure where marketers start stacking channels, not to drive value, but to show up in reports. That’s not strategy. That’s attribution manipulation.


The real answer is incrementality. Not flashy. Not bloated with fake numbers. But actually useful. It tells you whether a campaign drove new value. Not whether it was nearby when something happened. Incrementality doesn’t care about touchpoints. It cares about impact. And if you’re serious about understanding what works and what’s wasting money, that’s the only thing that matters.


If your attribution model makes every channel look like a hero, you don’t have a great marketing mix. You have a broken measuring stick.

Why Incrementality Is the Answer for Performance Marketers

INCRMNTAL is right: attribution rewards “credit” over impact. For performance marketers, especially those running retargeting campaigns, this is a dangerous trap. When every channel is painted as a hero, it’s nearly impossible to know which campaigns are truly driving ROI — and which are just riding the wave of organic behavior.

Incrementality flips the script. Instead of asking “Which channel should get the credit?”, it asks “Would this conversion have happened without this campaign?” That subtle shift makes all the difference.

1. Incrementality reveals true ROI

Traditional attribution can make even weak campaigns look effective. Incrementality strips away the noise, showing you the real causal lift a campaign provides. For example, if you’re running a retargeting campaign on lapsed users, incrementality testing will reveal whether your ads brought them back or if they would have reopened your app on their own.

2. It aligns budgets with business value

Attribution often creates misaligned incentives, rewarding platforms for “showing up” rather than delivering impact. Incrementality ensures you put more dollars behind channels that actually move the needle, whether that’s CTV, mobile, or another touchpoint.

3. It works across walled gardens and privacy changes

In a world where user-level IDs are disappearing, incrementality doesn’t depend on following individuals around. It’s built for a privacy-first era, giving marketers confidence in their measurement even as cookies, IDFA, and GAID fade away.

Making the Shift: From Attribution to Incrementality

For performance advertisers ready to move beyond attribution illusions, here are three practical steps:

  1. Reframe success metrics
    • Replace last-touch or view-through reporting with incrementality-based KPIs.

    • Focus on measuring causal lift instead of credit assignment.

  2. Test and learn
    • Use A/B or geo-holdout tests to compare “exposed” vs. “non-exposed” audiences.

    • Run always-on incrementality measurement to continuously validate performance.

  3. Align teams around impact
    • Shift conversations from “how much credit did this channel get?” to “how much new value did this campaign create?”

    • Encourage leadership and media teams to look past flattering dashboards toward sustainable growth.

Key Takeaways

  • Attribution rewards credit, not impact. It flatters dashboards but distorts reality.

  • Incrementality is the antidote. It measures causal lift — the only metric that matters for ROI.

  • Performance marketers can’t afford illusions. Incrementality aligns budgets with value, not vanity.

  • Privacy is no longer optional. Incrementality thrives in a world where IDs and tracking are disappearing.

👉 Ready to see how YouAppi can drive incremental growth through performance-based retargeting? Work with YouAppi.

👉 Want a deeper dive into incrementality measurement? Work with INCRMNTAL.