Attribution Models

Attribution means assigning credit to the marketing touchpoints (ads, emails, organic visits) that contributed to a conversion. The simplest model is last-touch (credit the last thing they clicked), but most customer journeys involve multiple interactions across days or weeks.

The core components are: a data layer that captures all touchpoints, logic that stitches anonymous and known user sessions together, a model that distributes credit (first-touch, linear, time-decay, data-driven), and reporting that shows which channels drive the most value.

Most companies either over-simplify attribution (only last-touch) or over-complicate it (custom ML models before they have enough data). We start with platform-native attribution, then build custom models when you have the volume and business complexity to justify it.