What is attribution?

What people think attribution is:

Many organizations have misconceptions about attribution, viewing it primarily as a way to assign credit for sales and marketing outcomes. This often leads to teams focusing on individual touchpoints, trying to identify a single decisive channel, or simply attributing success broadly to "the team." These approaches can create unnecessary competition between departments and reduce attribution to a simple ROI calculation for budget justification.

This narrow view of attribution misses its true value as a strategic tool. When teams get caught up in claiming credit or obsessing over individual metrics, they lose sight of attribution's real purpose: understanding and optimizing the customer journey to drive better business outcomes.

What attribution actually is:

Attribution starts with understanding the complex patterns in buyer journeys, campaigns, and revenue paths. This foundational knowledge helps teams map out how different touchpoints contribute to success.

Organizations need to analyze data through multiple models to build this understanding and conduct incrementality testing. This creates a complete picture of attribution rather than relying on simplistic single-touch models. When combined with both qualitative and quantitative data, teams can make more informed strategic decisions.

The insights gained from proper attribution enable smarter execution across marketing activities. Teams can improve their outbound campaigns, account-based marketing (ABM) initiatives, list-building processes, and ad bidding strategies. They can also design and measure experiments to continuously optimize their approach.

Most importantly, effective attribution helps align all teams around revenue goals. Rather than creating silos or competition, it provides a shared understanding of how different efforts contribute to overall business success.

If you're fighting over credit or trying to track everything, you're doing attribution wrong.