Attribution & Analytics
Marketing Attribution
A plain-language Open Developer definition.
Definition
What it means
Marketing attribution is the practice of assigning credit for a conversion (a sale, a signup) to the specific marketing touchpoints that led to it — which ad, which email, which organic search visit actually drove the outcome. Different attribution models (first-touch, last-touch, multi-touch) distribute that credit differently, often producing meaningfully different answers to "what's working" from the same underlying data.
Why teams track it
Why it matters
No attribution model is objectively "correct" — each makes different assumptions about which touchpoints matter, and the right question is whether a model's assumptions match your actual customer journey, not which number sounds most impressive. Our research also found a structural limitation shared by multiple attribution tools: none of the ones we reviewed filter bot or invalid traffic from the data feeding their models.
Applied context
Where you’ll see this term
Our entire AI Analytics & Attribution category is built around this concept — see Triple Whale, Northbeam, and Hyros for three different attribution approaches.