Terms of Trade · Edition 1: The PE deck
Attribution
Definition
The method by which a sale is credited to the marketing that produced it. Last-click gives all the credit to the final touchpoint, multi-touch shares it across several, and every advertising platform runs its own model that credits itself, which is why the channels’ attributed revenue added together usually exceeds the revenue the business actually took.
Field note
Attribution is best described as a stab in the dark, because most marketers do not really know where their customers are coming from, and so cannot turn anything off. That is the commercial consequence: a budget that can only ever grow, because every channel has a report proving it was responsible for the sale.
Board question
Which channel has been switched off in the last twelve months, and what happened to sales when it was?
Applied through
Incrementality, the next entry, is the honest answer to this one; Channel Resilience in the Cat’s Whiskers reads the dependency it creates.
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