Three myths about attribution

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. A few things about attribution that get repeated more often than they get checked.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

“It only matters for big sites”

Last-click attribution overvalues the final touch. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

“Our platform handles it”

Use it to allocate budget, not to settle arguments. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The short version

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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.