Marketing Attribution

Marketing attribution is the practice of attribution focused specifically on measuring marketing channels' and campaigns' share of the outcome, for budget and ROI decisions.

Attribution is the general idea of crediting an outcome to touchpoints; marketing attribution brings that idea to a specific goal: which marketing rial produced what fruit. Its difference from general attribution is scope, not mechanism — the same models (first-click, last-click, linear, data-driven) are used here too, but the question is always tied to budget and channel. That tie to money is what separates marketing attribution from purely behavioral attribution: to decide budget you must place the analytics input (which channel brought how many conversions) beside that channel's real cost (which comes from the ad platform). So marketing attribution is inherently a cross-tool exercise; a web analytics tool gives its behavioral half and the cost half must come from elsewhere.