Attribution

Attribution is the process of assigning credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoints that preceded it.

Attribution is fundamentally a modeling choice, not an observed fact — no system directly measures "how much did this ad cause this sale." It infers credit based on a chosen model (last-click, first-click, data-driven, and others), and different models will assign meaningfully different credit to the same customer journey. This is why switching attribution models can make a channel look dramatically better or worse overnight with zero actual change in performance.

Attribution answers "who gets credit" — a fundamentally different, weaker question than incrementality's "what actually caused this to happen." A channel can win most of the attributed credit for conversions that would have occurred through a different channel, or organically, anyway.