Marketing Attribution

Most buyers see your brand many times before they convert: an organic search, a paid social ad, a webinar, a sales email, a comparison review. Marketing attribution is the discipline of dividing the credit for the eventual deal across those touchpoints. Done well, it tells you where to invest more and where to cut.

The classic models are first-touch (all credit to the first interaction), last-touch (all credit to the last), linear (split evenly), time-decay (more credit to recent touchpoints), and data-driven (a model learns the credit weights from your conversion history). Data-driven attribution is the most accurate when you have enough conversions to train it; for small B2B teams, position-based or time-decay is often a better practical default.

Attribution has gotten harder in the privacy era. iOS tracking changes, cookie deprecation, and consent requirements have eroded the deterministic identity graph that older tools relied on. Modern attribution increasingly leans on marketing mix modeling (top-down statistical analysis of spend vs. revenue) and incrementality testing (controlled experiments that prove a channel caused conversions, not just correlated with them) to fill the gaps.