Attribution: what to get right first

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. If you only fix one thing about attribution this quarter, make it the first item below.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Start here

Last-click attribution overvalues the final touch. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Then this

No model is correct, some are useful. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Eventually

Use it to allocate budget, not to settle arguments. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What this looks like day to day

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. Three things worth confirming about attribution before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• No model is correct, some are useful — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.