Campaign attribution is the practice of connecting a business outcome — a lead, a signup, a sale — back to the specific marketing campaign, channel, or piece of content that drove it, typically via UTM parameters, campaign records in a CRM, or platform-native attribution tools.
Attribution is only as reliable as the consistency of the tracking data feeding it: a UTM mismatch, an unmapped campaign field, or a silently broken tag can each quietly corrupt attribution without any obvious symptom, which means the underlying error is often discovered only when the reporting doesn’t make sense.