Looking forward and backward
This is our 100th issue! So first, I want to say thank you.
What started as a simple weekly teardown has grown into something much bigger. We’ve covered everything from Mad Max BFCM strategies to advertising during natural disasters and the epic rise of Applovin.
Through that time, I’ve heard from CMOs, founders, and media buyers all over the world. Your replies, your questions, and your honesty drive this newsletter forward. The Media Buyer only works because you’ve kept reading, showing up, and forwarding it to friends.
I cannot thank you enough. So I dedicate this issue to you all.
To kick off our 100th issue, I want to answer the most common question we get.
"Why is Northbeam's data better?"
Let’s talk about why this even matters.
Properly attributing revenue to the ads that drove it is the cornerstone of growth marketing.
If your attribution is wrong, everything downstream is wrong too. Your CAC math, your creative experiment results, your spend allocation, your forecasting, even your hiring plan. You end up scaling what isn’t working and killing what is. And every “it’s probably fine” assumption digs the hole deeper.
We started Northbeam because we saw too many intelligent marketers suffering from bad attribution. It was a massive gap in the toolkit.
The walls of the walled gardens are getting higher, and we saw the writing on said metaphorical wall. Attribution without an MTA solution was only going to get harder.
This is why we built Northbeam to be the gold standard for first-party attribution data and more.
Not just better than nothing. Better than any other attribution solution you could buy or build, period.
So to celebrate our 100th issue, here’s a huge rundown of what makes Northbeam’s data better.
Plus some challenges you can pose to your current attribution/measurement solutions provider.
1. Improved control over recency bias
Northbeam offers accrual accounting, crediting the full journey of marketing interactions, not just the last click. That means upper funnel campaigns finally get the credit they deserve, even if the purchase happens days or weeks after the initial touchpoint.
Let’s say Sally bought a widget from you. Each step of that journey would be tracked in Northbeam like this:
Day 1: Sally clicks an awareness campaign on Meta.
Day 5: Sally clicks a consideration campaign on Google Ads.
Day 10: Sally clicks a Meta conversion ad and purchases.
Even with short lookback periods, Northbeam attributes revenue across all stages. This means you won’t over-bias towards campaigns at the bottom of the funnel, a serious problem that everybody reading this has probably dealt with.
To be clear, cash (“order-time”) reporting is also supported when you have to align your revenue numbers with finance or your operations team.
If you aren’t on Northbeam, ask your measurement provider:
- Do they support accrual (impression-time) accounting?
- Does accrual accounting apply across the entire customer journey?
- Does their model correct recency bias even with short lookback windows? For example, can an awareness campaign receive credit weeks before a purchase?
If the answers are no, you’re leaving money on the table.
2. Continuous attribution updates for past and future accuracy
We take measuring marketing impact seriously.
The best way to do that is by continuously recalculating attribution whenever new data arrives. Northbeam doesn’t ever “lock in” attribution, allowing you to track the long tail impact of all your ads. Which we know is happening, because we know marketing works, even if we can’t always see the impact. Now you can.
Ask your measurement provider:
- Can they retroactively update attribution if they discover missed data? For example, if an ad platform had a reporting outage, can they add delayed data?
- How far back can they ingest historical data?
- If you integrate a new ad platform with a year's worth of past data, will that data be included?
3. Visibility into all customer interactions, including views
Northbeam tracks both deterministic and probabilistic interactions. This means you know who clicked your ad, but you can also know who only saw your ad and eventually purchased.
Most advertisers have a huge blind spot when it comes to viewthroughs. This is why you “know” TikTok drives revenue but you can’t prove it with data. Even TikTok will admit that clicks-only attribution undervalues conversions on TikTok by 73%.
Now you can unequivocally prove the revenue impact of those campaigns with our Clicks + Deterministic Views model. No more blind spots.
Ask your measurement provider:
- Do they offer deterministic view data? For which platforms?
- Do they support probabilistic view modeling?
- What are the limitations and lookback periods?
4. Precise separation of new or returning customers
If a user buys twice in a week from the same ad, we tell you that clearly, measuring them once as a new customer and once as a returning customer. This helps you understand what really happened, so you can properly optimize toward new customers. Which you should be doing.
Ask your measurement provider:
- Do they clearly distinguish new versus returning visitors?
- Can they accurately differentiate between new customers and repeat buyers?
- For example, what if a user purchases twice from the same ad?
5. Flexible recategorization of historical data
Let’s face it - sometimes you need to change your entire taxonomy.
But doing so would ruin your entire historical dataset, right? Northbeam lets you adjust your marketing categorization at any time, even retrospectively, without losing historical context or requiring manual reprocessing.
Ask your measurement provider:
- Can historical data categories be updated, such as campaign naming conventions or channel definitions, without data loss?
- Are these changes fully reversible without data loss?
- Can they create completely custom marketing taxonomies to match your business needs?
6. Accurate, event-based lookback windows
Northbeam calculates lookback windows precisely based on event timestamps, not reporting dates. This means you get more realistic insight into user behaviors. Most attribution solutions slap attribution into arbitrary daily timeframes, meaning you don’t really know when a touchpoint is happening.
Ask your measurement provider:
- Do they use exact event timestamps to calculate lookback periods? For example, does a "1-day lookback" mean exactly 24 hours from the purchase event?
7. Accurate, event-based lookback windows
Northbeam reports only actual revenue earned, never inflating performance figures. Since there’s no double counting of conversions, your outputs might seem conservative at first glance.
Then you’ll realize they line up perfectly with your Shopify reporting and suddenly, that’s when it really clicks. That’s when you’ll be ready to scale. Slap Profit Benchmarks on your ad account and you’re off to the races.
Ask your measurement provider:
- Do they provide accurate profitability benchmarking across all strategies and platforms?
- Does their reporting ever inflate revenue numbers or double-count sales?
The final word
Great attribution unlocks great media strategy. You can only hack it for so long without MTA.
When you trust your data, you can spend with confidence. You can identify which hooks convert new customers. You can run tests that actually mean something. And you can walk into board meetings knowing your numbers are real.
Northbeam wasn’t built to make your dashboards prettier. It was built to make your business more scalable.
Want to see what that looks like?
Help me pump up my pipeline numbers and book a demo here.
As always, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week.
Cheers,
-bryan
P.S. an immense thank you to our VP of Product Stas Goldobin for his contributions to this week’s issue.
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