Marketing attribution in India was never precise and is now actively misleading. Three changes broke it, and pretending otherwise leads teams to defund the channels that are actually working.
What broke
Consent-gated analytics. Under DPDP-aligned consent practice, a share of visitors will decline analytics cookies. Those people convert and appear nowhere in your attribution.
WhatsApp and dark traffic. A link shared in a WhatsApp group arrives with no referrer. It lands in direct traffic, which for many Indian B2B sites is now the largest and least informative bucket.
AI answers. Someone who reads about you in a ChatGPT answer and then searches your brand name shows as branded organic. The AI mention that created the demand is invisible.
Three things that still work
Self-reported attribution. Add a required “how did you hear about us” field with a free-text option to your demo form. It is imprecise and biased toward recency, and it still beats a model that cannot see half your traffic. Compare its answers against your analytics and treat large divergences as signal.
Holdout tests. Turn a channel off in one region for a month and compare total pipeline against a matched region. Expensive, disliked, and the only method that measures incrementality rather than correlation. Run it once a year on your largest channel.
Blended CAC against a channel-mix log. Track total sales and marketing spend divided by new customers, monthly, alongside a written note of what changed in the mix. You lose per-channel precision and gain a number that cannot be gamed by attribution settings.
What to stop doing
Stop reporting last-click channel ROI to leadership as if it were fact. It systematically overcredits branded search and retargeting, which capture demand created elsewhere, and undercredits content and anything social.
Teams that keep optimising on last-click end up with a budget concentrated in demand capture and nothing creating demand. It looks efficient in the dashboard right up until pipeline dries up, at which point the dashboard has no explanation to offer.