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Social marketing

Attribution

Attribution is the methodology used to assign credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoints (ads, emails, organic visits, referrals) that contributed to it.

The two simplest models are first-touch (the touchpoint that first acquired the visitor gets credit) and last-touch (the touchpoint immediately before conversion gets credit). Both are common defaults and both systematically distort decisions — first-touch overweights top-of-funnel, last-touch overweights bottom-of-funnel.

Multi-touch attribution (linear, time-decay, position-based) distributes credit across multiple touchpoints in a journey. These models are more accurate but harder to implement — they require tracking individual users across sessions, devices, and channels, which has gotten harder since iOS 14.5 and the deprecation of third-party cookies.

Modern best practice is to combine multi-touch attribution at the digital level with periodic incrementality testing (media mix modelling) at the strategic level. Each method's blind spots are filled by the other. Single-model attribution at scale almost always misallocates spend.

Related terms

  • Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

    A marketing qualified lead is a lead that has demonstrated enough engagement with marketing material — content downloads, form submissions, repeat visits — to be considered worth handing to sales for further qualification.

  • Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

    A sales qualified lead is a marketing-passed lead that has been further validated by the sales team — usually through a discovery call — as having budget, authority, need, and timeline to potentially purchase.

  • Marketing Funnel

    A marketing funnel is a model of the customer journey from initial awareness through to purchase and beyond, used to align marketing activities and metrics to specific journey stages.

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