Attribution
Attribution is the rule set that assigns credit for revenue to prior touchpoints, a definitional choice, not a measurement you can discover.
Every attribution model is an explicit set of decisions: what counts as a touchpoint, over what lookback window, at what granularity (contact or account), and under what credit distribution. First-touch, last-touch, linear and time-decay are not competing truths; they are different questions. Multi-touch does not resolve the ambiguity, it parameterizes it.
Because the model is definitional, the governance question matters more than the tool: who owns the model, who can change it, and are historical periods restated when it changes. A model that is silently modified makes year-over-year channel comparison meaningless.
Where it breaks
Two attribution models run in parallel, one in the marketing platform, one in the BI layer, and the pipeline-sourced number differs by a factor that nobody can reconcile.
Related terms
- Campaign hierarchy
- A campaign hierarchy is the structure that lets spend and response roll up consistently, programme to campaign to tactic to asset, so reporting aggregates without manual mapping.
- UTM governance
- UTM governance is the enforced convention for tagging inbound links so that traffic source resolves to one value rather than to a family of near-duplicates.
- Sourced vs. influenced pipeline
- Sourced pipeline credits the origin of an opportunity to a single first cause; influenced pipeline credits every qualifying touch, so the two must never be summed.
- Metric definition
- A metric definition is the governed specification of a measure, its formula, source fields, filters, grain, owner and known limitations.
Field notes on this
- The MQL debate needs an acceptance record
A recorded acceptance decision makes lead-quality disputes inspectable. It is a signal, not a complete diagnosis of demand performance.