The Kinetic319 founder and CEO on closing the loop between marketing spend and actual revenue, and why every ad platform wants credit for the same sale.
Every marketing platform wants to be the hero of your conversion story. Run an ad on Meta and it will happily take full credit for a sale that also involved a YouTube view, a Google search, and an email open two weeks earlier. “Meta in my mind is the worst culprit of this. You get a whisper of an ad and they will take full credit for it all day long,” said Adam Ortman, founder and CEO of Kinetic319, on this episode of Deconstructing Data. After 20 years running media for clients across higher ed, SaaS, retail, and e-commerce, Ortman has built his entire agency around a simple, uncomfortable idea: most companies stop measuring the moment a lead comes in, right when the real work should start.
Why isn’t generating leads the finish line?
Ortman sees this constantly, whether the client is a scrappy startup or an enterprise brand: marketing teams and agencies treat a lead as the end product. It isn’t. “Generating leads should not be the end of the story,” Ortman said. The real question is what happens after the form fill: how the lead matures into an opportunity, how sales actually rates its quality, and whether that outcome ever gets mapped back to the campaign that produced it.
Kinetic319 just published a book on exactly this, called Converting Leads Into Sales, because Ortman argues most marketing organizations are optimizing for the wrong metric entirely. A lead that never closes isn’t a win. It’s a data point that, if tracked properly, should be changing how you spend your next dollar.
How do you fix attribution when every channel claims the same conversion?
The fix starts before the lead ever hits your CRM. Ortman’s team runs a full audit with every new client, checking that campaign data, not just a name and email, actually survives the trip into HubSpot or Salesforce. That means clean UTM parameters on every campaign URL, tracking source, campaign, and creative variant all the way through.
The more advanced piece is closing the loop in the other direction. Platforms like Google and Meta generate a click ID, roughly a 100-character alphanumeric code, that can be passed through the CRM and back into the ad platform once a lead actually becomes a sale.
“By uploading this code back into Google, you’re telling Google that, one, this sale took place, but also you’re able to correlate the sale back to the ad that they clicked on, the device that person was on, the geographic location… you unlock this larger picture.”
— Adam Ortman, Founder and CEO, Kinetic319
Without that feedback loop, Ortman argues, the ad platforms are optimizing blind. “Without good data getting passed to Google, indifferent of its source, Google can’t do its job,” he said. Feed it real revenue signal instead of just form submits, and the algorithm starts bidding toward customers who actually buy, not just people who fill out a form.
What does multi-touch attribution actually measure?
Multi-touch attribution is the discipline of crediting more than just the last click. Most companies default to last-click by nature of how ad platforms report, meaning a Google Search ad gets full credit for a sale even if a YouTube pre-roll, a CTV spot, and a direct mail piece all played a role earlier in the journey. Ortman described a furniture retailer client that ran TV, radio, digital, and direct mail together, and only by measuring the full sequence discovered that direct mail alone barely converted. Layered after enough TV and radio exposure, though, the same mail piece became the reminder that closed the sale.
He also flagged a channel most marketers forget to weigh at all.
“Even people that are well-versed in multi-touch attribution often do forget about the organic and the direct channels… how incredibly impactful AI chat has been to this specific topic, because you’re not necessarily paying to play for visibility in AI chat or any of the LLMs. It is changing your customer journey flows literally overnight.”
— Adam Ortman, Founder and CEO, Kinetic319
That’s GEO, generative engine optimization, showing up as a real attribution variable, not a future consideration. Alongside SEO, trade shows, sponsorships, and PR, it’s part of what Ortman calls the “beyond paid” picture that CFOs tend to undervalue because it’s harder to put a dollar sign next to.
What’s a good Marketing Efficiency Ratio, and why does it matter more than channel-level attribution?
For businesses that can’t or don’t want to build out full multi-touch tracking, Ortman recommends a blunter but still powerful metric: Marketing Efficiency Ratio, or MER. It’s simply total business revenue divided by total marketing spend, no channel-level attribution required.
“An MER, a good MER, is anything three plus really. You’re spending a dollar on marketing, you’re getting three dollars back. We’re usually seeing them in the six to ten plus range.”
— Adam Ortman, Founder and CEO, Kinetic319
The appeal, Ortman said, is that finance and marketing leaders can rally around the same number. “CFOs love this one. CMOs love this one, because it does tell that story: when we spend X, we get Y.” It’s not causal proof, but it’s correlative enough to catch a campaign that’s quietly dragging on overall performance, even when individual channel metrics look fine in isolation.
Underneath all of it is a data-first posture Ortman holds his own team to. “It’s one of those things where if we’re telling you, using our gut, what you should do, you should really question what Chinese food we had for lunch, because the data should be the compass at the end of the day,” he said.
The bigger picture
Ortman’s tech stack reflects the same instinct toward connected systems over isolated tools: Asana for project management, Fathom for AI meeting notes that auto-push action items into client workspaces, and Looker for dashboards built on top of roughly 700 API integrations feeding a central data warehouse. None of it works in a silo, and neither should your marketing measurement.
The through-line of this conversation is that attribution isn’t a reporting exercise, it’s a business discipline. Clean data flowing into the CRM, revenue signal flowing back out to the ad platforms, and a top-level number like MER that keeps finance and marketing looking at the same picture. “We are much more effective partners when we can see the larger picture,” Ortman said. “When we’re just one tree in a forest, we can see what’s going on with the whole forest so that we can help it grow better.” That’s the difference between a marketing team chasing leads and one actually driving revenue.
Want to hear more from Adam Ortman? Visit Kinetic319 or connect with him on LinkedIn.
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Watch the full episode: Full-Funnel Growth: Smarter Attribution and Revenue Optimization
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
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