Attribution: a practical guide

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. This guide covers what attribution actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

Why it matters

Last-click attribution overvalues the final touch. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here.

How to approach it

No model is correct, some are useful. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Use it to allocate budget, not to settle arguments. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Last-click attribution overvalues the final touch
• No model is correct, some are useful
• Use it to allocate budget, not to settle arguments
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

Where it usually goes wrong

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

Where to go from here

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.