What to ask your agency about attribution

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on attribution, these questions are worth asking early.

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Last-click attribution overvalues the final touch. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Use it to allocate budget, not to settle arguments. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

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
• 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

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.