By Joshua Meyer · 18 July 2026
Every quarter a marketing team somewhere buys a new analytics tool to solve a disagreement that is not about analytics. The disagreement is about what counts as a lead, who owns the pipeline number, and which team gets credit when revenue arrives.
Before you touch a tag manager, get three people in a room: the person who owns demand, the person who owns sales, and the person who owns the budget. Write down a single definition of a qualified opportunity. Sign it. Everything downstream becomes an implementation detail.
Once the definition exists, the technical work is genuinely straightforward. Instrument the events that map to that definition, resist the temptation to track everything, and publish one dashboard that both teams look at in the same meeting.
The agencies that struggle with attribution are usually the ones who started with the tooling. The ones that succeed started with the argument, and settled it.