Five mistakes teams make with attribution

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit attribution.

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Warning signs

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Last-click attribution overvalues the final touch
• No model is correct, some are useful
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Use it to allocate budget, not to settle arguments. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Making it stick

How to tell if yours is fine

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. 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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.