How losing first touch attribution on Google Analytics could hurt your marketing

Hi there. I wanted to do a short follow up video today around the topic of Google Analytics retiring their first touch attribution model inside of Google Analytics. To me, that's absolutely crazy. Or said in another way, I wouldn't be able to know what to do if I didn't know what was consistently the first touch of the deals that go far down our sales pipeline or deals that we win.

I understand why Google Analytics can't see anything meaningful about this for B2B companies, but me as a person in B2B go-to-market. As a B2B marketer, I would feel completely blind if I didn't have this information available. Now, if you go to and head to the thread, you'll see all sorts of opinions back and forth about why you should never use Google Analytics for attribution.

I would pretty much agree. But there is also others that are actually partly defending Google in this move. But I wanted to show you just a few screenshots from within Dreamdata of touches that I would absolutely not be able to work with if I hadn't had those first touches available. Let's see here if we can go. I think this one is getting in the way.

So here, for example, I can see that from the HubSpot marketplace. We actually won some businesses. No, that's actually one of the blogpost where we're mentioned by HubSpot. So the tactic that I can derive from here is really okay. One of the blog posts on HubSpot worked. Maybe I should contact my account manager at HubSpot to see if there's other blog posts that work.

Here to this one and just get to see me a little bit again. Now here's a paid social ad that was the first touch of an account that we won. Isn't that valuable? Let's go to this one here. The first touch is organic social on LinkedIn. That's a really important sign for us because we're instructing our salespeople, particularly to to post often on on LinkedIn, preferably every week.

And we can see here that a journey actually started by somebody clicking go to the website from our social profile. Hugely valuable, again. Here's another page social account that we won. And I think this one is a Google one, right? Yeah. So here's somebody whose search for multi-channel attribution inside of Google ended up becoming a customer later on.

So, for me, it's really crazy that you would retire a first touch model, like what is the first touch of accounts that you win? Isn't that important? For me, it's very important. Of course, it's important to know the first touch if accounts that you never win. But the accounts that you win, you want to be looking for whether the stuff you can repeat.

Is there certain campaigns that always start journeys that go far down your pipeline? If you don't have a first touch attribution available, you wouldn't notice. And if you're relying purely on Google Analytics to tell you what to do in your B2B marketing, you're just a little bit worse off now if you want an alternative.

If you want insights like this, then give Dreamdata a try. I think you're going to like what you're going to see. Bye.