Marketing attribution is the practice of assigning credit for a closed deal to the marketing touchpoints that influenced it — the channels, campaigns, and content a buyer engaged with on the way to purchase. In B2B, where deals involve many people over many months and dozens of touches, attribution is genuinely useful and genuinely easy to get wrong.
How it works
Attribution models split credit across a buyer’s journey using a rule. First-touch gives all credit to the first interaction; last-touch to the final one before conversion; multi-touch spreads it across several. Each model answers a different question — what starts deals, what closes them, what’s involved throughout — and none is “correct” in the abstract.
The model is a lens, not a fact. Change the model and the same deal credits different channels, which is exactly why attribution has to be read carefully rather than trusted blindly.
Why it matters
Attribution drives budget. When you decide which channels to fund, you’re acting on your attribution model whether you’ve examined it or not. Get it right and money flows to what genuinely produces revenue. Get it wrong and you defund a channel that quietly influences every deal, or over-invest in one that merely happens to be last in line before the form fill.
The common mistake
Two, and they compound. First, treating the model’s output as objective truth rather than the artefact of a chosen rule — attribution can flatly mislead you depending on which model you pick. Second, running attribution on broken data: if source information is lost or overwritten at the handoff, the model is dividing credit across a picture that’s already wrong. A sophisticated model on bad inputs produces confident nonsense.
Use attribution as one input among several, know which question your model answers, and check the data feeding it before you trust the chart.
Related reading
See what closed-loop reporting is and signs your attribution model is misleading you.
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