Glossary Terms

attribution

Attribution is how you assign credit for a sale, sign-up, or booking back to the marketing that helped cause it. The catch is that most purchases involve several moments of contact over days or weeks, and each of those is called a touchpoint: someone finds you in search, comes back through a social ad, and finally buys after an email. I treat attribution as a budgeting question, not an analytics one, because the model you pick decides which channels look profitable and therefore where next quarter's money goes. The common trap is last-click attribution, the default in most tools, which hands all the credit to the final step and quietly starves the earlier work that first brought the person in; for most service businesses a position-based or data-driven model gives a saner picture without rebuilding your whole measurement setup.