In this talk, Michael Stratta will introduce a concept every paid media professional recognizes the moment they hear it: dead reckoning, navigating by calculation alone from a last known position, with error accumulating every hour. Precise arithmetic. An instrument ceiling you can't see. Confident decisions from a position you cannot verify.

Today's attribution stack has the same problem. Google Ads claims the conversion. Meta claims the conversion. GA4 runs a different model and gets a different number. And underneath all of it is a choice most practitioners never consciously made: which attribution model is actually governing your budget decisions?

Last-touch tells you who closed. First-touch tells you who started. Linear pretends the journey is flat. Data-driven learns from your account, but only inside Google's walls. Each model tells a coherent story. None of them tell a true one. And the one you're running right now is determining which campaigns you scale and which you kill.

Mike will make the case for Markov chain attribution, a probabilistic, path-based approach that reveals what every other model hides, and leave attendees with a clear framework for finding ground truth in a fractured stack.