From Fragmented to Future-Proof: Rebuilding Attribution with MMM, MTA and First-Party Identity
August 15, 2025
August 15, 2025
The measurement debate has long been framed as a showdown between Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA). On one hand, MMM offers a high strategic view of marketing effectiveness. On the other, MTA gets granular, and dives into the detail of customer journeys, assigning credit to each touchpoint along the path to conversion.
For decades, marketers across many industries and verticals have been sure-fire on one of these options to place their bets, asking: Which one is better? Which one do I really need to invest in?
It’s a fair question, especially when budgets are tight and the pressure from the board to prove ROI is relentless.
But here’s the thing. What if it’s not a competition at all? What if they aren’t even in the same class?
Whether it be for healthy living, or your model in which you make marketing decisions on. Garbage in equals garbage out.
No matter how sophisticated your analytics or attribution model is, its output is only as good as the data it’s fed. More data doesn’t automatically mean better outcomes. In fact, inaccurate or noisy data can mislead more than it informs.
Success in modern marketing relies on inputting clean, accurate, and consented data into your decision-making models. When it comes to data, quality always trumps quantity.
As the world has shifted towards a focus on robust privacy protections in various forms (GDPR/CCPA, Apple ITP, Google’s clawback of third-party cookies), it’s not a question of MMM vs MTA initially. It’s a question of is the data I’m feeding it strong enough to give my business the decision-making capabilities it needs?
Multi-touch Attribution (MTA) was in some parts regarded as the primary standard for optimisation. It allowed marketers to trace every digital touchpoint, from the first ad impression to the final conversion, assigning credit along the way. Marketers asked which creative drove the last click or which mix of creatives and channel brought in consistently high users over the short term or what ads drove the best customer lifetime value? MTA had you covered.
But MTA’s biggest strength, user-level tracking, has become its greatest weakness.
As third-party cookies go through their own struggles on Chrome and vanish on almost every other browser (thanks Apple ITP), user tracking identifiers of the ‘when’ and the ‘what’ with consumers have been locked down by browsers and increasingly regulators.
Historically most marketers would typically look over a 30-day window to track a customer’s journey for their time to purchase. This was possible via third-party cookies. The issue today is that 30-50% of your audience are using browsers that are blocking third-party cookies.
Non-chrome browsers today are re-seeding cookies every 7 days – meaning that when a new client visits your site, when they return on day 8 that user is a new cookie and you lose visibility into that user’s journey.
That same customer who is then incorrectly counted as ‘net new’ journey, instead of counting towards that initial multi touch attribution journey.
UTM’s are now an inaccurate source of source/medium tracking for channels. UTM’s are now getting stripped in Safari and getting mis-recorded, often falling into ‘Direct’ on Google Analytics.
Journeys are incomplete, user tracking is restricted, and CPA calculations are blended, and often undercalculated.
Attribution in 2025 is a lost art and a fragment of its former glory. MTA hasn’t become irrelevant; however, it has become increasingly inconsistent, given third-party cookie deprecation and privacy implications.
While MTA benefits the marketer at a tactical level, MMM has exploded onto the scene at the strategic “budget allocation” level.
It is phenomenal for splitting up budgets across channels TV, BVOD, performance, social & PR as examples. Each MMM is formulated different, but they all fundamentally work with aggregate data - spend, impressions, sales revenues and external variables like holidays or economic trends to determine how each channel is contributing to outcomes over time.
Many of the CMO’s we speak with at AdFixus often use MMM first to justify a strategic and board room level discussion of allocation of spend. Once they have that, then comes the value of MTA – which is getting more tactical squeeze out of each channel & medium.
MTA has always relied on user level tracking. Its power lies in being able to follow a single person across channels and devices, attributing performance back to the media, message, and moment that mattered most.
But that model is crumbling. Why?
Without stable identifiers, the MTA trail goes cold. Touchpoints become disconnected. Conversions look like they came out of nowhere. The very granularity that made MTA powerful is now its Achilles’ heel.
Here’s how the two complement each other:
Media Mix Modelling:
Multi-touch Attribution
So the question is then can we solve for tracking in MTA?
AdFixus ID is a first-party, deterministic identity solution that gives marketers the ability to restore a granular user-level visibility, without relying on antiquated, or privacy unsafe methods such as third-party cookies, fingerprinting, or external ID vendors.
Here’s how it solves the attribution gaps:
AdFixus is a foundational level ID that is deployed on your website. With our deployment methodology, we ensure your websites ID does not get restricted in privacy agnostic browsers, (e.g. Apple - Safari) as to avoid negative impacts on marketing data via signal loss.
A Reconnected Measurement Framework
With AdFixus ID in place, marketers can finally:
Instead of fractured data and guesswork, you're operating with a connected, consented, and future, proof measurement framework.
If your attribution models have gone dark due to signal loss, AdFixus can help you switch the lights back on, across all your domains, every user and every conversion.
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