The practice of assigning credit for a conversion (a sale, a signup) to the specific marketing touchpoints — an ad, an email, an organic search visit — that contributed to it.
Why it matters
Without attribution, it's difficult to know which channels and campaigns are actually driving results, which makes budget allocation closer to guesswork. Attribution is also genuinely difficult to get right, since most customers interact with several touchpoints before converting, and different attribution models will credit those touchpoints very differently.
In a sentence
"Last-click attribution was giving all the credit to branded search, when in reality the awareness campaign earlier in the journey was what introduced the customer to us in the first place."
Related terms
- Often confused with: Attribution model (attribution is the general practice; an attribution model — like first-click, last-click, or multi-touch — is the specific rule set used to assign credit, and different models can tell very different stories from the same underlying data).
- Synonyms: Marketing attribution.