Marketing attribution consultant: one operator for strategy and measurement
Your GA4 and your bank account tell two different stories. I fix that - not with a dashboard handover, but by owning both the strategy and the measurement as a single fractional engagement.
Two hires, two numbers, zero accountability
The standard approach is broken by design. You hire a strategy consultant for channel mix decisions. You hire an analytics vendor to set up tracking. Neither owns the revenue number. Both optimize for their own output.
The strategy consultant picks channels based on platform-reported conversions. The analytics vendor delivers clean dashboards and exits. Nobody is in the room when the attribution model fails - and it always fails eventually.
Last-click attribution is the most common failure. You are running Meta and Google together. Google claims every conversion that touched search. Meta claims every conversion that touched a social ad. Your actual revenue is a fraction of what both platforms report combined. You have no idea which channel actually drove the customer.
Multi-touch reality is messier. A B2B SaaS buyer sees a LinkedIn ad, reads a case study, searches your brand, and converts 11 days later. Last-click gives Google 100% of the credit. First-touch gives LinkedIn 100%. Both are wrong. The real picture requires stitching together server-side events, CRM data, and a model that matches your actual sales cycle.
One head, one number
I am not an analytics vendor plus a strategy consultant. I am one operator who owns both.
When I run a growth engagement, I set the channel strategy AND build the measurement infrastructure that validates it. Those two jobs cannot be separated. If you make budget decisions based on broken tracking, the strategy is broken - even if the logic looks sound.
I have managed $100M+ in ad budgets. Every dollar required a defensible answer to where it went. That answer came from server-side tracking, proper identity resolution, and cross-channel attribution models I built and maintained - not from platform dashboards I trusted at face value.
Platform-reported ROAS is not revenue. Revenue is what hits your bank account. The job of a marketing attribution consultant is to close that gap.
How I run attribution work
Stack audit
I map every tracking touchpoint: pixels, dataLayer, server events, UTM hygiene, CRM sync. I find the gaps before we talk strategy.
Server-side foundation
Browser-side pixels miss 30-60% of events depending on your checkout stack. I implement server-side collection - server-side tracking with proper deduplication so you are not double-counting.
Identity resolution
Stitching anonymous sessions to known users across devices and channels. This is what makes attribution defensible instead of decorative.
Attribution model selection
Last-click, data-driven, time-decay, position-based - each makes different assumptions. I pick the model that matches your actual sales cycle, not the one that flatters your biggest channel.
Cross-channel reconciliation
Platform-reported conversions vs actual revenue vs CRM. I build the reconciliation layer that tells you which numbers to trust and why.
Decision framework
What does the data tell you to do? I translate attribution output into budget allocation decisions, channel mix changes, and creative strategy.
What a marketing attribution consultant covers
Included in scope
GA4 audit and server-side event repair. GA4 audit with purchase capture validation. Meta CAPI implementation and deduplication. Google Ads enhanced conversions. UTM taxonomy design and enforcement. Cross-channel attribution reporting. Budget reallocation decisions based on actual data.
Out of scope
Platform campaign management (I refer that out). BI dashboarding for its own sake. Attribution for companies spending less than $20K/month in paid channels - the complexity does not pay off at that scale yet.
Connected specialties
Frequently asked questions
What does a marketing attribution consultant actually do?
How is this different from hiring an analytics agency?
How long does an attribution engagement take?
Do you work with GA4, or do you replace it?
What size company is this right for?
Fix the gap between your ad platforms and your revenue
15 minutes. I will tell you whether attribution is your real problem and what fixing it requires.
Where the numbers fall apart
Multi-touch models that ignore sales cycles
B2B SaaS with a 90-day sales cycle runs last-touch attribution. Every deal gets credited to the retargeting ad that ran on day 89. Content and outbound that drove awareness on day one get zero credit. Budget shifts to retargeting. Pipeline dries up in 90 days.
GA4 and CRM reporting different realities
GA4 shows 80 conversions. Salesforce shows 47 closed deals. Nobody investigates the gap. Marketing claims 80 wins. Sales says the leads are bad. The real answer: GA4 fires on form submit, CRM fires on opportunity close. Both correct. Neither comparable. A marketing attribution consultant maps the gap and stops the blame game.
Offline conversions invisible to digital
30% of B2B deals close on a call or in a room. Zero digital attribution. Meta and Google optimize toward the 70% that is measurable, which skews toward self-serve buyers. The ideal customer, who calls in, gets no media weight. I fix this with offline conversion upload to Meta and Google Ads, mapped to actual revenue.
Platform-native attribution vs reality
Meta says a campaign drove 120 conversions. Google says it drove 95. Combined they claim 215. You only closed 80 deals. Both platforms use self-attribution, so overlap is invisible. A single attribution model that ingests all signals, deduplicates by customer, and maps to actual CRM revenue is the only way to know the truth. That is what I build.
Sources: Google Analytics docs · Yaniv Goldenberg on LinkedIn