Attribution rarely dies in the ad account. It dies at the handoff — the moment a click becomes a contact.
The pattern is almost universal: UTMs are present on the landing page, the pixel fires, everything looks healthy. Then the signup is created via an API call, a different subdomain, or a backend process — and the CRM record is born with no source at all. Weeks later, marketing is defending a spreadsheet where 60% of pipeline is “direct / unknown”.
Three checks find the leak fast. First: create a test contact through every real signup path (form, API, SSO, mobile) and inspect which source fields survive. Second: verify first-touch fields are write-once — most CRMs happily overwrite them on the next form fill. Third: confirm a shared identity key exists from anonymous visitor to signup to customer; without one, no tool can stitch the journey no matter what its pricing page claims.
Fixing the handoff is unglamorous plumbing. It is also the single highest-leverage attribution work most B2B companies can do — because every report downstream inherits it.