Announcing: Northbeam + Common Thread Collective

Today Northbeam is announcing a partnership with Common Thread Collective (CTC) that makes our enterprise-grade deterministic attribution platform more accessible for seven-figure direct-to-consumer businesses.

Through this partnership, CTC will deliver the full Northbeam attribution suite as a managed service to the seven-figure businesses in its client base.

This includes Northbeam’s C+DV (Click + Deterministic Views) attribution model, which uses real user identifiers rather than probabilistic modeling, an unlimited attribution window, deterministic view-through tracking, campaign-level new customer ROAS, and cross-platform credit assignment across channels including Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and AppLovin.

Northbeam data flows directly into Statlas, CTC's forecasting and reporting platform, where a dedicated Prophit Engineer uses it to manage daily media decisions on the business's behalf.

"Northbeam is an expensive product to run because we do astronomically more data processing than anyone else doing what we do," Northbeam co-founder and CEO Austin Harrison said. 

"That's made it hard to support smaller businesses directly. The CTC partnership is how we close that gap. They take on the operational layer so we can deliver enterprise-grade attribution to businesses who couldn't access it before."

Why we built this

We see this as a response to a structural gap in ecommerce measurement that disproportionately affects mid-market businesses.

"My mission is to bring enterprise-grade solutions to SMBs," CTC CEO Taylor Holiday said. "Like what Shopify did with arming the rebels, we help entrepreneurs succeed by bringing best-in-class tooling to life on their behalf. That's what CTC is after."

CTC's own attribution research found that the best available platform attribution window captures only 86 percent of actual new customer acquisition. The standard one-day click window captures just 47 percent. Meta's longest DTC attribution window is seven-day click. Google's view-through caps at one day. 

Since Meta, Google and other ad platforms don't "speak" to each other, it becomes difficult to reliably identify new versus returning customers across channels.

The result is that seven-figure businesses routinely make seven-figure media allocation decisions using tools that miss more than half of the underlying performance.

Also: incrementality testing, through geo-holdouts and media mix modeling, has historically required budgets out of reach for businesses under the eight- and nine-figure range.

This partnership solves that problem, bringing Northbeam's best-in-class measurement to operators who truly need it.

What the beta found

During the beta period, participating businesses surfaced significant additional attributed performance that platform reporting had not captured.

1. A luggage business recorded a 283 percent increase in attributed transactions, a huge leap up thanks to expanded viewthrough attribution.
2. A CPG company identified 175 percent more attributed revenue beyond platform reporting - revenue that was driven by marketing but hadn't been properly credited.
3. A cosmetics business captured a 550 percent increase in attributed transactions, allowing them to more accurately evaluate their upper-funnel spend.

These figures represent transactions that were already occurring but were invisible under the businesses' previous attribution setup, exposing campaigns that may have been cut and channels that may have been defunded based on incomplete reporting.

More information is available at the CTC × Northbeam partnership page.

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