Marketing
Attribution
Also called
- Multi-touch attribution
- MTA
A customer sees a paid social ad, reads a blog post two weeks later, searches your brand name, and converts. Attribution is the question of which of those deserves credit — and every model answers it differently, because there is no fact of the matter to recover.
Last-click over-credits the final step, which is usually brand search, which is usually credit for demand created elsewhere. First-click over-credits discovery and ignores everything that closed the deal. Data-driven models are better and are still models.
The professional answer is to report several and explain what each one over-credits, then make budget decisions on the pattern rather than on one number. A single model presented as truth is how a marketing team loses the finance team's trust.
Attribution decides where budget goes. Getting it wrong systematically defunds the channels that create demand and overfunds the ones that harvest it.
Commonly misunderstood
What people get wrong
The claim
“GA4 tells us which channel drove the sale.”
What is actually true
It tells you what its model assigns. That is a useful input and not a measurement. Incrementality testing — turning a channel off and watching what happens — is the only way to get closer to causation.
Where this comes up
Services where it matters
Related terms
Next step
Working through a attribution decision?
Tell us the situation. We will give you the tradeoffs as we see them, including when the answer is that you do not need what you are being sold.
No pitch deck. A 30-minute conversation about what you are trying to achieve.