Marketing attribution

Plain answer

Marketing attribution is the rule that decides which touchpoint gets credit when someone converts. A buyer might click a Google ad, see an Instagram ad, then search your name and buy — attribution decides who gets the trophy, and every report you read depends on that choice.

How attribution actually works

Customers rarely convert on first contact; they accumulate touches across platforms and days. An attribution model is the accounting rule applied to that trail:

• Last-click hands full credit to the final touch.
• First-click credits the introduction.
• Data-driven — now the default in Google Ads¹ — splits credit statistically across the touches.

None of them is "true"; each is a defensible way of slicing an unknowable question.

Why do Google and Meta both claim the same sale?

Because each platform attributes from its own point of view and never sees the other's touches. A sale that involved both a Google click and a Meta view can appear, in full, in both dashboards — add the platform reports together and you'll count some conversions twice. That's not fraud; it's perspective. But it means platform-reported ROAS is each platform's opening argument, not the verdict.

What should a small business actually do?

Skip the enterprise modeling and triangulate. Keep conversion tracking clean in each platform, but grade the whole system on numbers no platform can inflate: total new customers, total marketing cost, revenue in the bank. If platform dashboards glow while the bank account doesn't, attribution is flattering someone. Asking every new customer "what made you reach out?" is unfashionable and remains the cheapest attribution tool ever built.

Field note from Tomas

The breakthrough at one B2B software company I worked with wasn't a fancier model — it was wiring every channel into the CRM so budget and ROI were visible in one place. Perfect attribution doesn't exist; visible attribution does. Get every channel reporting into one system first, then argue about models.

What this means for your ads

Pick one model, leave it alone, and compare campaigns under the same rule — switching models mid-quarter makes trends meaningless. Use attribution to compare and allocate, and reserve final judgment for blended, bank-account math.

Tomas Kolafa

Founder, Bytown

14+ years running paid acquisition, managing $85M+ in ad budgets — co-founded the ad agency Growth Media, led marketing ($0–50M) at RVezy.com. He's spent the budgets, run the campaigns, and read the reports.