Are your customers misremembering how they found you?

In a courtroom, even the most confident witnesses often get the story wrong. They remember what they think they saw — not what actually happened. The same problem happens in marketing every day.

Companies ask new customers, “How did you hear about us?” and then take those answers at face value. Unfortunately, people are unreliable narrators of their own buyer journey. Human memory isn’t a recording; it’s a reconstruction.

As a result, marketing teams build reports, dashboards, and even budgets on faulty self-reported attribution — and that can lead to costly, misleading conclusions.

The billboard that never existed

Early in my career, I worked for a company that asked every lead how they discovered us. The form included several options, and among them were “television ad” and “billboard.”

Here’s the catch: We had never run a single TV commercial or billboard in our company’s history.

And yet, month after month, people confidently selected one of those nonexistent options.

It was a revelation. Customers weren’t lying — they were misremembering. They wanted to give an answer that made sense, even if it wasn’t true. “Billboard” sounded familiar. “Television” felt legitimate. Those were plausible stories they could tell themselves to fill in the blanks of their decision-making process.

That experience taught me an enduring lesson: people’s memories are not data.

The psychology behind false attribution

This phenomenon is well documented in cognitive science. Humans don’t retrieve memories like files from a hard drive; we reconstruct them each time. In the process, we unintentionally fill in gaps with assumptions or familiar details.

Two psychological biases are especially relevant in marketing attribution:

• Availability bias
  People tend to recall what feels familiar or top-of-mind — not necessarily what’s true.
  
  
• Recall bias
  Memory fades quickly, and when pressed for an answer, individuals choose what seems plausible.

So when a customer says, “I heard about you from a friend,” that might not be wrong — but it’s rarely the whole story. They may have first seen your company name in a Google result, read a blog post, or seen your logo in a news article before ever hearing a friend mention you.

Why “How did you hear about us?” fails

The classic “How did you hear about us?” field on contact forms creates an illusion of precision. It seems helpful — quick, easy, and direct. But in reality, it produces false confidence that leads to poor decisions.

When you depend on self-reported data:

• You may cut high-performing channels that aren’t being credited.
  
  
• You may over-invest in sources that appear stronger than they are.
  
  
• You lose visibility into the multi-touch journey that actually drives results.

For example, let’s say a customer says they found you on Google. Maybe that’s true, or maybe they first clicked an online review, saw a Facebook post, or read a press release you earned months earlier. Each of those steps contributed, but none will be reflected in their answer.

This creates what I call the “Unreliable Narrator Problem” in marketing attribution.

Marketing’s witness problem

Imagine running your business based solely on eyewitness testimony — no video, no data, no records. That’s what happens when marketing leaders rely only on what customers say instead of what the numbers show.

In public relations, we often remind clients: perception drives reputation. In marketing, perception also drives recall. The result is a gap between what actually happened and what people believe happened.

That’s why leading organizations are moving beyond anecdotal attribution toward verifiable, automated insights.

A better way: Evidence-based attribution

At Axia Public Relations, we advocate for evidence-based attribution — replacing guesswork with measurable data.

The process involves three essential steps:

1. Integrate your systems.
   Connect website analytics, call tracking, and central resource management data. This links form fills and phone calls to actual revenue outcomes.
   
   
2. Automate attribution.
   Use analytics tools like Google Analytics 4, CallRail, and a CRM (such as Knowify or HubSpot) to automatically trace the customer journey from first click to closed deal.
   
   
3. Eliminate memory from the equation.
   Instead of asking people to recall where they came from, rely on technology to record where they actually did.

This approach gives companies a clear picture of which marketing activities are working — and how they work together — without relying on fallible human memory.

The business impact of getting attribution right

Once you have reliable attribution data, every marketing decision becomes sharper and more confident:

• You’ll see exactly which campaigns and channels drive profitable leads.
  
  
• You can optimize your investments in SEO, PR, content, and paid media accordingly.
  
  
• You’ll prove ROI more accurately and make strategic budget decisions rooted in fact.

In our experience, the shift from self-reported attribution to data-based tracking often reveals surprising truths. Channels that seemed underperforming begin to show measurable impact, while others that appeared dominant lose their luster once properly measured.

Bottom line: Stop trusting memory. Start trusting data.

Relying on customers to tell you how they found you is like asking eyewitnesses to describe a car accident. They’ll get some details right, but not the sequence or the causes.

If your marketing reports are based on what people say, you’re making strategic decisions on stories, not evidence.

Modern marketing requires more than intuition. It requires integrated systems, verifiable data, and disciplined analysis.

The companies that adopt data-driven attribution will stop chasing myths and start scaling what works.

Ready to replace guesswork with proof?

For more information on how we can elevate your PR strategy, explore our services today or book a one-on-one consultation.

Clients love Jason’s passion, candor, and commitment as well as the team he has formed at Axia Public Relations. He's advised some of America’s most admired brands, including American Airlines, Dave & Buster’s, Hilton, HP, Pizza Hut, and Verizon. He is an Emmy Award-winning, accredited public relations practitioner, speaker, author, and entrepreneur and earned his certification in inbound marketing. He founded the PR firm in July 2002. Learn more about Jason.

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk