There’s a persistent frustration haunting boardrooms and marketing departments in retail: reporting. We’re drowning in data from Google, Meta and affiliate networks, but starving for wisdom. Teams measure success in isolation, leading to overlapping spend, distorted ROI and missed opportunities.

From cashback to PPC to paid social, the issue isn’t usually the channels themselves. It’s the broken approach to measuring them, says Luke Atherton, Performance Marketing & Insights Director at Visualsoft.

The danger of a siloed view

When your PPC team is chasing a Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) target, your social team is focused on engagement and your affiliate partners are driving last-click sales, channel cannibalisation is inevitable. Each team hits its KPIs, but the business still leaks money because no one is looking at the full picture.

Last-click or siloed attribution models tell us where the customer finished their journey, but not how they started it or the steps in between. It’s like giving all the credit to the cashier, but ignoring the window display, store layout and the helpful staff member who guided the sale.

When we were approached by HMV to relaunch their affiliate programme, the goal wasn’t just to make that single channel profitable. It was to make it profitable for the business by understanding its true contribution to the marketing ecosystem.

The fix begins with one question: what does good actually look like? Before fixing measurement, you need to define what you’re measuring against. Establish a single source of truth for success – not for the channels, but for the business.

Whether your primary objective is reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC), grow more new customers or an uplifted ROAS across all activities, once you have that North Star metric, every team sees how they contribute. The conversation shifts from ‘my channel did X’ to ‘my channel contributed Y to our shared goal’.

A practical framework for unified attribution

Most businesses think they need expensive tools and structural changes to fix this problem – they don’t. Tools can help, but even with the best platforms, teams revert to siloed thinking if the foundational goal isn’t unified. It’s about changing culture, not just software. It’s what I call The North Star Attribution Framework.

This isn’t about new tech. It’s about a new social contract between marketing teams and agency partners. Agree on a single destination (the North Star) and work together to get there.

Step one: define and evangelise your North Star

Host a collaborative workshop with all stakeholders – internal team leads and external agency partners. Agree on a single, business-critical North Star metric for the next quarter or year.

This isn’t a top-down directive, it’s a group commitment. Every person’s primary goal is now to move this single number.

Step two: map contributions, not just conversions

Reframe the purpose of each channel. Instead of ‘what did my channel convert?’, ask ‘how did my channel contribute to the North Star?’

In a follow-up session, whiteboard the customer journey together. Map out where each activity realistically fits. Identify the introducers, influencers, and closers. This creates shared understanding and respect for channels playing vital early roles, even if they don’t get the final click.

Step three: create rituals of shared accountability

Consistency embeds change. Replace siloed channel reporting with a single weekly stand-up. Each team reports on two questions; first, what they did to move the North Star, and second, what they learnt to help move the North Star next week.

This creates a culture of transparent, collaborative problem-solving. It stops being about defending channel performance and starts being about collectively hitting the shared goal. Success and failure become team responsibilities.

From theory to smarter decisions

Adopting a joined-up model does more than clean up reports. The real magic happens with simple, consistent and unified actions.

This approach builds alignment between internal teams and agencies, leading to more accurate measurement and better budget planning. You stop moving money around based on siloed data and start investing it based on true, incremental value. Because what if your best-performing channel isn’t what you think?