Every Monday morning, somewhere in Mumbai or Bengaluru or Delhi, a brand manager is doing the same thing: opening three separate Excel sheets, copying numbers from agency reports into a master file, and trying to figure out whether the ₹18 lakh spent on influencer campaigns last month actually moved the needle.
This scene, repeated across hundreds of India's direct-to-consumer brands, represents one of the most consequential inefficiencies in the country's marketing economy. Money is moving. But the infrastructure to understand where it goes — and what it does — hasn't kept up.
The scale of the problem
India's D2C sector is now a serious commercial force. By most estimates, it crossed ₹50,000 crore in gross merchandise value in 2023 and continues to expand rapidly, fueled by a generation of founders who understand digital marketing well and are willing to invest in it aggressively.
But aggressive spending and intelligent spending are not the same thing.
The brands getting this wrong aren't unsophisticated. They have CMOs with good instincts and agencies with real capabilities. The problem is structural. Their attribution infrastructure — the systems that connect marketing actions to business outcomes — was built for a simpler era, when a brand ran one or two channels and could loosely track what worked.
Today, the typical funded D2C brand might be running influencer campaigns across fifteen creators, editorial placements in six publications, an affiliate program with twenty partners, performance ads on Google and Meta, and podcast sponsorships on top of that. Each of these channels has its own reporting format, its own definition of a conversion, and its own incentive to present numbers favorably.
How attribution breaks down
The breakdown happens at the seams between channels.
Consider a customer's actual journey. She sees a fitness creator's reel about a protein brand on Tuesday. She doesn't click. Three days later, she sees a review in a health newsletter she subscribes to. She clicks through but doesn't buy. On Saturday, she searches for the brand directly, finds it, and purchases.
In most attribution setups, this sale gets credited entirely to organic search. The influencer gets zero credit. The newsletter gets zero credit. The brand's performance marketing team reports an efficient acquisition. The influencer team reports poor conversion. And nobody in the room has a clear picture of what actually drove the sale.
What the best-run brands are doing differently
A growing cohort of brands has figured out a different approach. They've stopped treating attribution as an agency responsibility and started treating it as core infrastructure that the brand owns.
The mechanics are straightforward: every external partner — influencer, publication, affiliate, agency — gets a unique tracking link. Every campaign runs through the same attribution layer. Commission codes provide a secondary attribution path for customers who screenshot links and buy later. And all of this data feeds into a unified view that the brand controls, not any individual vendor.
The result isn't just cleaner reporting. It changes the entire dynamic of agency relationships. When every partner's performance is measured against the same standard, the conversations stop being about vanity metrics and start being about cost per sale.