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I’ve been in more attribution conversations than I can count. Some start with curiosity: “Why isn’t LinkedIn showing up in our reports?” Others begin with panic: “Our paid search budget doubled and we’re showing fewer sourced opps.” And more often than not, it comes back to Marketo Measure (formerly Bizible).
We implement these tools with the best of intentions, clean dashboards, clear ROI, and a predictable pipeline. But unless the foundation is rock solid, Marketo Measure can start to feel like a black box. One that’s spitting out inconsistent data, half-filled reports, or worse—data that contradicts what your teams know is happening in the market.
And after leading dozens of Marketo Measure implementations, cleanups, and executive readouts, I can tell you this: attribution accuracy doesn’t come from working harder. It comes from working smarter and putting strong operational guardrails in place before the numbers even appear on your dashboard.
Here are five best practices I come back to again and again to make sure Marketo Measure becomes a strategic advantage, not a fire drill.
- Fix Your UTMs
Let’s start where some problems begin: with broken, missing, or inconsistent UTMs.
I once worked with a team whose entire paid media budget was being lumped into “Direct” in Marketo Measure. Why? Because their UTM parameters varied depending on who was building the campaign. Sometimes utm_medium=linkedin, sometimes utm_medium=paid-social, and sometimes… no UTMs at all.
No attribution model—no matter how smart—can fix inconsistent source data. Set a single source of truth for UTM naming conventions and make sure everyone follows it, from ad ops to field marketers to your email team.
Use a UTM builder with locked dropdowns and document exactly what each value means. Better yet, build it into your campaign request forms.
- Clean Up Your Channel Mapping Rules
Marketo Measure’s Online Channel Rules are often misunderstood or ignored…until something goes wrong.
This is the engine behind how your touchpoints get grouped: Is that utm_medium=cpc traffic being counted as Paid Search? Is your utm_source=linkedin routing correctly to Paid Social? If you don’t audit this, you’ll get attribution reports that don’t match the reality of your campaigns—and you won’t know why.
What’s tricky is that the order of rules matters too. If multiple rules apply, Marketo Measure stops at the first match. So one overly broad rule at the top (e.g., all traffic from .com domains = Web Direct) can swallow everything else whole.
Schedule a quarterly review of channel rules, especially if you’re adding new platforms, adjusting media strategy, or changing your UTMs.
- Not All Touchpoints Deserve to Be Counted
This one’s controversial, but critical: More data isn’t always better.
By default, Marketo Measure can create touchpoints from almost anything—email opens, internal testing clicks, even system-generated page views. That might look impressive in a chart, but it makes strategic decisions harder. If your reports are full of noise, you’ll miss the signal.
That’s where suppression rules come in. You can—and should—filter out touchpoints from internal IPs, bots, testing activity, and low-value interactions. You want your dashboards to reflect buyer behavior, not marketing team activity.
Suppress email opens and internal traffic from attribution. They rarely drive decisions and almost always muddy the waters.
- Align Your SFDC Campaign Structure with Attribution Logic
Here’s a less obvious—but equally powerful—best practice: Your SFDC campaign structure should mirror how you want to report attribution.
If campaign member statuses are inconsistent, or if statuses aren’t updating reliably (e.g., leads marked as “Attended” before the webinar even happens), you’ll get unreliable attribution data. Worse, Marketo Measure might not even create a touchpoint at all if the campaign doesn’t meet inclusion rules.
Think of SFDC campaigns as the bridge between your execution and your analytics. Build with intention. Use a clear taxonomy. Define how “success” is measured per campaign type. And keep your campaign ops team tight with your analytics team—no more silos.
Bizible’s campaign inclusion logic only pulls in specific campaigns. Make sure your structure fits the rules, or change the rules intentionally.
- Revisit Your Attribution Model Quarterly
So many teams treat attribution models like a one-and-done decision. “We picked W-Shaped back in 2021” isn’t a reason to stick with it if your buyer journey has changed.
Are you seeing more PLG-style conversions? Are opportunities being created later or earlier in the funnel than they used to be? Are events a bigger driver than you thought? Your model needs to evolve in tandem with your go-to-market strategy.
And this isn’t just a marketing conversation. Sales, RevOps, and even Finance should be aligned on how “sourced,” “influenced,” and “primary campaign” are defined—and what that means when you’re reporting attribution at the board level.
Attribution isn’t a tool. It’s a shared language. Get everyone speaking the same one.
Conclusion
There’s no magic switch to make attribution perfect. But there is a process to make it better. Over time, these best practices build trust in your data, in your team, and in marketing’s contribution to revenue.
And if your dashboards still feel like a mystery, don’t panic. Fix the foundations first. Then let Marketo Measure do what it’s actually great at: telling the story of how buyers move through your funnel, and what’s worth investing in next.
We’d love to hear what other teams are doing to level up attribution. If you’ve got a story (or a war wound), send us a note, or contact us if you want to troubleshoot yours together. Attributa works with teams every day to refine their approach and uncover what’s really driving revenue. Let’s keep pushing attribution forward!
