Why Your Marketing Attribution Models Are Overcounting Social Referrals

Episode notes

Episode 22 of The Marketing Operator Podcast digs into a hidden bias in marketing attribution: social-media platforms are quietly over-counting their own credit. Lucas and Luna examine how the so-called 'last-click problem' has evolved into a 'social-attribution inflation' problem, where platforms like Meta and TikTok use URL-wrapping and click-through attribution to claim conversions that actually started elsewhere. They walk through a real example from a mid-market e-commerce brand whose Meta dashboard showed 34 percent of revenue from Instagram — but when they stripped out platform-biased attribution, the real number was under 12 percent. The episode explains what's happening technically (UTM-stripping, view-through attribution windows, and self-referral loops), why it matters for budget allocation, and how marketing ops teams can audit their own data. No theory — just a specific, fixable problem with a clear diagnostic approach.