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Attribution & Marketing Data: how to know what's working

12 articles by Melissa Kolbe.

Gold award trophies arranged like gravestones in a cemetery field at dusk, suggesting honored but lifeless objects.

Every dead stat in your deck still has its medals on.

You Can Do It All Yourself Now. That’s Exactly the Problem.

The analyst you routed around was the verification step, and AI hands you output without the check.

A glass hourglass on an executive desk, with sand falling from empty space above and passing through the sealed top, leaving the bottom forever empty.

The savings are real. The savings just don't go anywhere.

AI Is a Raise Paid in Hours. Stop Counting Them.

Hours saved with AI never come back as free time because something else always fills the slack.

White-gloved hands excavate buried Slack and email icons from an archaeological dig pit in an executive boardroom table, treating digital artifacts like ancient relics.

Enterprise knowledge management, circa 2025.

The $10M Question Your AI Can’t Answer (And Why That’s Your Advantage)

Systems of record store what was decided but not why, and AI agents hit that wall.

Visual metaphor for the Google Ads 'Great Decoupling': A rigged poker game illustrating how AI Overviews and rising CPCs are pricing SMBs out of the market in favor of large enterprises.

The SMB Guide to Surviving the Google Ads Collapse

Paid CTRs on queries with AI Overviews fell 68%, and the shift is exposing cracks that were always there.

Billboard showing '50,000 SITE VISITORS!' defaced with 'CAMPAIGN METRICS 2025' graffiti, comparing outdated traffic metrics to modern campaign attribution

Your Marketing Evolved to H2H. Your Metrics Didn’t.

Companies adopted H2H marketing strategy but kept campaign metrics, so relationship marketing stays unprovable.

Event data stream splitting into two directional arrows: blue arrow labeled 'What caused this?' pointing to past attribution analysis, orange arrow labeled 'What's next?' pointing to future operational intelligence predictions

Event-Sourcing for Attribution: What Discovery Actually Revealed

Attribution and operational intelligence are the same technical problem, using identical event streams with different queries.

Scattered Polaroid photographs showing various marketing analytics dashboards and charts spread across a desk, representing fragmented snapshot-based attribution data that lacks continuous historical context

Why Marketing Data Should Work Like Banking Records, Not Polaroids

Attribution should store every touchpoint as an immutable event, like a bank ledger, not overwrite snapshots.

Spreadsheet with red error highlights showing messy data and validation issues.

Is Your Data Ready for AI? It Never Will Be, and That's Fine

Your data will never be perfect, and waiting for clean data before using AI means waiting forever.

The ‘No Data, No Problem’ Guide to Measuring AI Implementation Success

You can prove AI value before ROI data exists by tracking early indicators from day one.

AI Marketing in 2025: Turning Data into Competitive Advantage

Data readiness, not budget or technology, separates organizations succeeding with autonomous AI agents from those struggling.

AI Marketing in 2025: Your 90-Day Data Transformation Plan

In the Sarah example, fragmented marketing data actively undermined the team's credibility with leadership.

AI Marketing in 2025: Why Your Data Strategy Can’t Wait

Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol makes marketing data readiness urgent, not optional, in 2025.

The AI Strategist

One email a week: the newest post, what I'm reading, and the occasional odd find. Written for people running small and growing businesses, not for AI insiders.

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