Attribution

Attribution is the attempt to assign conversions to the marketing contacts that preceded them, from last-click to multi-touch models. It promises precision: every channel gets its fair share of the result. In practice attribution mostly measures correlation inside the digital customer journey and misses everything outside it, from television to word of mouth. The structural danger is that attribution rewards channels that intercept buyers who were going to buy anyway, pushing budget toward the bottom of the funnel. Incrementality experiments and econometrics are the correction: they estimate what would have happened without the campaign, instead of crediting whoever touched the buyer last.

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