Getting started with attribution
Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. A short on-ramp to attribution for teams who have not touched it before.
More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
The reason this keeps coming up
Last-click attribution overvalues the final touch. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- No model is correct, some are useful
- Change one thing and measure it
Use it to allocate budget, not to settle arguments. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
What this looks like day to day
Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Three things worth confirming about attribution before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Last-click attribution overvalues the final touch — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.