Attribution
Deciding which marketing effort gets credit for a sale — always an approximation, and dangerous when treated as a fact.
Attribution is how you assign credit for a sale to the marketing that produced it. Last-click gives it all to the final touch; first-click to the first; multi-touch splits it. Every model is a choice about what to believe, and none of them is the truth.
What matters is knowing which way your model lies. Last-click systematically over-credits search and email — the channels people use once they already know they want you — and systematically under-credits everything that created the want. Cut the under-credited channel and search volume for your name falls three months later, by which point nobody connects the two events.
The cheap correction most operators skip is asking. A single required field on the enquiry form — "how did you hear about us" — produces messier data than analytics and truer data, because it captures the conversation at a dinner table that no tracker can see. Use both: the analytics for what is measurable, the answer for what is not.
Worked: analytics credits 80% of clients to search. The intake form says 45% search, 30% referral, 25% "saw a talk". Cutting the talks because they attribute nothing would remove the source of a quarter of the business and, in time, some of the searches too.
Also known as
- marketing attribution
- last-click
- source tracking
Relevant for
- Creators
- Last-click will always credit the link in your bio and never the two years of posts that made someone click it — ask buyers directly, and weight the answer.
- Business owners
- Add "how did you hear about us" to your enquiry form; word of mouth is invisible to every tracker and is usually the channel funding the practice.