attribution model
The rule for splitting credit for one sale across every ad, email, and link the buyer touched on the way there.
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What it is
Someone sees your Instagram ad, forgets about you, reads a blog post two weeks later, then googles your brand name and buys. Three touchpoints, one sale. An attribution model is the rulebook that decides how the credit gets split. It is a bookkeeping convention, not a discovery of truth.
The usual menu: last click (final touch takes everything, the default almost everywhere, flatters branded search and retargeting), first touch (flatters top-of-funnel discovery), linear (split evenly), time decay (recent touches weigh more), position based (often 40/20/40 across first, middle, last), and data-driven (the platform fits a model and will not fully show you its work). Pair whichever you pick with an attribution window: 7 days, 30 days, 90 days. The window changes the answer as much as the model does.
Gotcha: every ad platform grades its own homework, so summing conversions across Google, Meta, and your analytics tool gives you more sales than you made. Attribution also cannot prove causation. The only thing that does is a holdout or incrementality test where you switch a channel off for a slice of people and watch what happens.
Ask AI for it
Compare attribution models for my funnel using a worked example of one conversion with 4 touchpoints (paid social ad, organic blog visit, email click, branded search). Calculate the credit each touchpoint gets under first touch, last click, linear, time decay, and position based (40/20/40), and show it as a table with the arithmetic. Do not produce numbers for data-driven attribution: mark it not computable from a single path, and state exactly what it would need instead (a dataset of converting and non-converting journeys, and the fitted model's own per-touchpoint weights or Shapley values). Then say which model over-credits which channel, how a 7-day versus 30-day attribution window changes the result, and why the platform-reported numbers will not add up.