Attribution for small teams

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Most advice about attribution assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

More dashboards rarely produce more decisions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What to keep

Last-click attribution overvalues the final touch. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

The practical version

Use it to allocate budget, not to settle arguments. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

How to tell if yours is fine

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

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