Attribution

Attribution is how you decide which traffic source gets the credit when someone buys or signs up. It sounds simple until you realize most people touch a business more than once before they act.

Say a reader finds you through a Google search, comes back a week later from your email, then buys after clicking a Facebook ad. Which one made the sale? All three helped. Attribution is the set of rules you use to assign the credit.

Google search  ->  Email  ->  Facebook ad  ->  Purchase
   (first)                       (last)

The two common approaches are first-touch, which credits whatever brought the person in the door, and last-touch, which credits whatever they clicked right before buying. Neither is perfect. First-touch ignores what closed the deal, and last-touch ignores what started it.

This matters because attribution decides where you spend. If you give all the credit to the last click, you might cut the email that actually warmed the reader up, then wonder why sales dropped. Getting attribution roughly right is more useful than getting it perfectly wrong.

You cannot attribute anything you do not track, so tagging your links comes first. To see why measurement should come before spending more on traffic, read why tracking comes before more traffic.