Marketing Attribution Is Jeremy Bearimy: Why Your Funnel Is a Lie (And What to Do About It)

If you have ever tried to explain digital marketing attribution to a client, you already know the feeling. You pull up the conversion path report. You point to the touching moments of logic connecting impression to click to sale. The client nods. And then they ask: "So which one actually did it?"

Shirtballs (If you know you know). That is the only appropriate response.

Attribution is not linear. It never was. And the best framework I have found for explaining this to anyone, client or colleague, comes not from a Google certification or an industry whitepaper but from a mid-season episode of The Good Place.

The Jeremy Bearimy Problem

In Season 3, one the show's main character played by Ted Danson draws a wavy, looping, self-intersecting line on a whiteboard and labels it "Jeremy Bearimy." This, he explains, is how time works in the afterlife. It goes forward, then backward, then sideways. Sometimes it loops. The dot over the "i" represents Tuesdays, also July, also the moments where "nothing never occurs."

It's funny because it is absurd. Every marketer should laugh (and die inside), because Jeremy Bearimy is exactly what a real customer journey looks like.

A user sees a display ad for your product on a Tuesday in July. They do nothing. Time, effectively, stands still. Three weeks later they hear about the product from a friend and Google it. They land on a comparison article from one of your affiliate content partners, skim it, and close the tab. A newsletter hits their inbox Friday morning, they click through, bounce from the pricing page. They see a CTV add. They get retargeted on Instagram. They google a coupon code. They land on a loyalty or deals affiliate site, find a code, and convert.

Which channel gets credit?

If you are running last-click attribution, the answer is the coupon affiliate. And if that is where your optimization decisions end, you have just built your entire growth strategy around the dot over the "i."

Why Last-Click Is the "ugh!" of Attribution Models

Last-click attribution is comfortable because it is simple. One channel, one conversion, one commission. Clean reporting, easy invoicing. It also quietly destroys your ability to understand what is actually driving growth.

Here is the thing about affiliate marketing specifically: the channel touches nearly every stage of the Jeremy Bearimy timeline, and it does so through radically different partner types. Content publishers create awareness and consideration. CTV and/or audio partners add recall. Comparison and review sites handle mid-funnel evaluation. Newsletter affiliates re-engage lapsed interest. Loyalty and cashback sites close transactions. Coupon affiliates capture intent that was already there.

Treating all of those as equivalent because they all theoretically produce last clicks is like blaming your GPS for the fact that you ended up at the restaurant. Every turn that got you there mattered.

Mapping the Affiliate Channel Across the Full Timeline

Let me walk through how affiliate partners actually interact with a customer across a non-linear journey, using Bearimy logic as the map.

The Awareness Loop

This is where time first bends back on itself. A customer encounters your brand not through your own paid media but through a content affiliate, a journalist-style review, an influencer who embedded your product into a YouTube deep dive, or a newsletter curator who featured you in a roundup. They are not ready to buy. They do not click through. But the brand impression registers.

Traditional attribution models see nothing here. Multi-touch models that include view-through or assisted conversions begin to capture it. Most affiliate programs, paying strictly on last-click CPA, do not compensate this activity at all, which means the partners driving it either drop the program or stop producing top-of-funnel content. You have just broken the first loop in the timeline.

The Consideration Spiral

Bearimy does not just go forward and back. It spirals. Customers in consideration mode return to the same types of content repeatedly, each time with slightly more intent. Comparison sites, "best of" listicles, Reddit threads, deal aggregators, and vertical-specific affiliate publishers all live here.

This is where affiliate touch points compound. A Stocks.News prospect might hit a "best stock research platforms" article three separate times over two weeks, each time clicking through to the landing page and bouncing. Those are three assisted conversions from the same affiliate partner, each one tightening the spiral before the eventual purchase. Under last-click CPA, that partner earns nothing unless they happen to be the final click. Under a data-informed, multi-touch model with assisted conversion visibility, you can compensate and incentivize that behavior.

The Stillness: When Nothing Happens Nowhere

The dot over the "i." The gap in the journey where the customer goes cold and you lose the thread. This is where email affiliates and newsletter partners earn their keep. They re-enter the picture not as closers but as re-ignition points. A well-timed sponsored placement in a finance newsletter does not look like a conversion event. It looks like a channel that underperforms on direct attribution and gets cut from the media plan.

This is one of the most common and costly mistakes in affiliate program management. Newsletter affiliates get measured against last-click benchmarks they structurally cannot win, so programs defund them. Then they wonder why their retargeting costs go up and their new customer acquisition stalls.

The Close: Where Jeremy Bearimy Ends

Loyalty, cashback, and coupon affiliates operate at the bottom of the funnel. They are closing mechanics, not discovery engines, and there is nothing wrong with that. A customer who was going to convert anyway and applied a coupon code still converted. The margin math is worth examining, but the channel is not the problem.

The problem is when you mistake the closing mechanic for the entire journey. When you run your affiliate program as if every partner is a coupon site and reward them all accordingly, you starve the partners operating at earlier stages of Bearimy and wonder why your pipeline dries up six months later.

Building a Program That Respects the Full Timeline

The practical answer is not to abandon CPA tracking. It is to layer intelligence on top of it.

Start by auditing your affiliate partner mix against your actual funnel stages. Segment your partners not just by vertical or promotional method but by where they realistically intercept customers on the timeline. A content affiliate who consistently appears in assisted conversion paths but never in last-click reports is not underperforming. They are functioning exactly as designed, and your attribution model is the thing that is broken.

Next, look at your commission structure. Flat-rate, last-click CPA models incentivize one behavior: closing. If you want partners to invest in awareness and consideration content, your compensation model needs to make that investment rational for them. Tiered commissions, performance bonuses, hybrid CPL plus CPA structures, and even flat content fees for high-authority placements are all levers you can pull.

Then, get your network reporting working for you. Platforms like Impact and Everflow have robust path-to-conversion and assisted click reporting that most affiliate managers barely touch. Pulling that data regularly and using it to have honest conversations with partners about their role in your program is what separates active program management from passive link distribution.

Finally, communicate the model to your clients or stakeholders before they ask. Walk them through their own Jeremy Bearimy. Show them the spiral, the loops, the stillness. Make the non-linearity visible before someone pulls a last-click report and starts defunding your top-of-funnel partners because they "don't convert."

The Forking Point

Here is what the show ultimately gets at with Jeremy Bearimy, and what makes it more than just a visual gag. The afterlife operates on a logic that human brains were not built to intuitively understand. The map looks insane because it is describing something genuinely complex in honest terms, rather than simplifying it into a straight line that feels correct but is not.

Marketing attribution is the same. The customer journey is Jeremy Bearimy. It loops and doubles back and pauses and restarts. Affiliate partners are active participants at every bend. The moment you flatten that into a straight line from impression to last click, you stop managing a program and start managing a spreadsheet.

The good news is you do not need to understand the dot over the "i" to build a better model. You just need to stop pretending the line is straight.