74% of Ad Spend Is Digital. "Winging It" Is No Longer a Strategy.

When digital was 20% of the budget, guesswork was acceptable. At 74%, it’s just reckless.

According to DataReportal’s Digital 2026 Global Overview Report, digital has hit roughly three-quarters of global ad spend. That means three quarters of every marketing dollar is now going to paid search, social, display, and video.

Yet most agencies still track digital like it’s 2017: a Google Ads dashboard here, a Meta report there. A spreadsheet someone says is “about as accurate as we can get.”

Every gap in the journey costs real money, and every untracked touchpoint skews the performance data.

Here’s the good news: the same shift that made the customer journey more complex also makes a modern solution possible. Marketers can create a tracking system for a world where digital dominates, so that “winging it” is no longer a necessity.

Digital Journeys Are Getting Complex

Once upon a time, a customer would walk into a store clutching a coupon clipped from the weekly print circular. There was no question as to what marketing effort brought in that sale.

Now, things are more complicated. The average customer journey is lengthening: Adobe reports that most customers have over 8 touchpoints before making a purchase, and 40% of customers’ buying journeys are now four months or longer.

These journeys have grown complex: a prospect sees your Facebook ad but doesn’t click on it. Weeks later, they Google your name and click a PPC ad. They browse and leave. Months pass. They return via organic search and submit a form. Days later, they call and book.

One lead, one sale, and multiple digital touchpoints that all claim the credit.

When your client asks about performance, you can only offer vague reassurance: the ads are running, leads are coming in, things look good overall.

But when they dig deeper and ask questions like:

• Which channel is actually driving sales?
• Where should we cut 10% of our ad spend?
• We found an additional $5K we can add to the budget; where should we allocate it?

…you can’t answer with confidence. Google says one thing, Facebook says another, and call tracking tells a third story.

How Lack of Confidence Turns into a Campaign Crisis

Even if your client never asks those questions, the customer journey gaps still kill your ability to optimize.

When you can only see first and last clicks, you can only optimize two levers: the campaign that started the journey and the one that closed it.

Everything in between? Invisible.

You miss the Facebook ad that built awareness three weeks ago. The blog post that answered questions. The retargeting ad that brought them back. The landing page that convinced them to engage.

Those middle touchpoints are where most persuasion happens. But you can't optimize what you can't see.

Meanwhile, competitors who track the full journey optimize every touchpoint. They know which awareness campaigns feed which consideration content. Which retargeting works after which interactions. Which landing pages convert prospects from specific sources.

They have more levers to pull.

You're stuck optimizing two endpoints while the middle runs on autopilot.

What Complete Digital Attribution Actually Means

Fixing this requires capturing every digital conversion—calls, forms, chats—and connecting them back through the complete customer journey across all digital touchpoints.

When a plumbing company gets a call, having access to the complete journey means you can see:

• Which campaign drove this call? Google Ads, "emergency water heater repair" keyword
• What was the full journey? Saw Facebook ad 2 weeks ago → clicked Google PPC ad 5 days ago → browsed site → returned via organic search yesterday → called today
• What else influenced the decision? Visited pricing page twice, read three blog posts, returned from direct traffic

That's the difference between a tally mark in a dashboard and understanding the complete path to conversion.

With that visibility, the agency can see:

• Facebook builds awareness that converts through Google search weeks later
• The branded search campaign captures 70% existing customers, not new revenue
• High-value service requests come from specific keyword themes
• Phone calls after 6 PM have 3X higher close rates than morning calls

This is what customer journey tracking should do. Not better guesses, but complete visibility into which digital touchpoints drive revenue.

How WhatConverts Closes the Gap

WhatConverts captures every lead—phone calls, web forms, chats—and connects them back through the complete digital customer journey.

• Multi-touch attribution tracks every marketing touchpoint from first visit to final conversion, showing you the complete path across Google Ads, Facebook, organic search, email, and direct traffic.
  
• Cross-channel visibility unifies data from platforms that don't talk to each other, so you can see how Facebook awareness feeds Google conversions, or how blog content assists phone calls.
• Campaign-level insights reveal which combinations of touchpoints drive conversions, so you can optimize the entire journey instead of just the endpoints.

When digital commands three-quarters of ad spend, you can't afford attribution gaps. Every blind spot in the customer journey means optimization decisions based on incomplete data.

The Bottom Line

Platform-level attribution wasn't built for multi-touch digital journeys. Google Ads can't see Facebook. Call tracking can't connect to ad clicks. Form tools don't know about phone calls.

When digital was a minor budget line, that was survivable. At three-quarters of total spend, it's negligence.

The agencies that fix digital attribution know which campaigns drive revenue. Those that don't are guessing with the majority of their budget.

That's the difference between strategy and winging it.

See the complete digital customer journey for every lead. Start your free 14-day WhatConverts trial and connect calls, forms, and chats to campaign performance—or book a demo to see how agencies track digital budgets with zero attribution gaps.