Attribution
AnalyticsAlso: Attribution Modelling · Attribution Model
Quick definition
Attribution is how you decide which of your marketing efforts gets credit when a customer buys something. Most customers see several ads, get an email, search a couple of times, then convert. Attribution is the system you use to divide up the credit between all those touches.
A customer touches all four, then converts.
Credit distributed
Last-click hands all credit to the final touch. Cheap to compute, blind to upper-funnel work.
How it varies across Australia
Most Australian businesses still report on last-click attribution by default and supplement with modelled attribution for paid social. The shift to marketing mix modelling is happening in larger Australian advertisers but adoption in mid-market lags.
See data and tracking scores across Australian industries →What it actually means
Think about three friends introducing you to a band you eventually buy tickets to. The first told you about them six months ago. The second played you a song. The third sent you the gig link. Who deserves credit for the ticket sale? Attribution is the marketing version of that question, multiplied by every ad, email, search and visit that touched the customer before they bought.
Different attribution models hand out credit differently. Last-click gives all of it to the final touch (the email link, in our band example). First-click gives it to the introducer (the friend who first mentioned them). Linear splits it evenly across everyone. Time-decay weights recent touches more heavily than distant ones. Data-driven uses the ad platform's machine learning to guess each touch's contribution. Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) uses statistics to back out the causal contribution from the spend data across channels.
Every model is wrong. Some are useful. The skill is picking the model whose wrongness costs you the least for the decision you're trying to make.
Perfect attribution is a fantasy. Useful attribution is an opinion you commit to.
How it shows up
Attribution shows up wherever marketing credit is being assigned. The default channel reports in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). The conversion numbers in your ad platforms. The lead-source field in your CRM. The revenue waterfall your finance team builds. The slide in every quarterly review where the agency explains why their numbers don't match yours.
It also shows up in the gaps. When a board asks 'how much did the brand campaign drive?' and three people give three different answers, that's attribution failing. There's no shared model so everyone has their own.
The Australian context
Australia's smaller media market makes attribution slightly easier in one way and harder in another. Easier because customer journeys are often shorter and less fragmented than equivalent US journeys. Harder because the data sample for modelled attribution is smaller, which means less reliable data-driven models and more reliance on rule-based attribution.
Australian privacy expectations sit between US and EU norms. ACMA's spam framework and the Privacy Act amendments are pushing Australian businesses to invest in first-party data and server-side tracking faster than equivalent US peers.
Where people get this wrong
Related terms
Common questions
Which attribution model should I use?
Use data-driven attribution if you have enough conversions for the model to be stable, otherwise time-decay. For brand campaigns and offline media, layer in Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM). Avoid pure last-click unless your sales cycle is very short and the customer rarely sees multiple touches.
Why does Google Ads report different conversions than GA4?
Different attribution windows, different model logic, different conversion definitions. Google Ads will usually credit itself more generously than GA4 will. Pick one as your source of truth and live with the other being advisory.
Is attribution dying because of privacy changes?
Tracking individual users across sites is harder than it was, mainly because of Apple's iOS changes and tighter browser rules. So attribution is shifting toward modelled approaches (machine learning fills in gaps) and Marketing Mix Modelling (statistics on aggregate spend). The field is changing, not disappearing.
How is attribution different from incrementality?
Attribution divides credit across existing channels. Incrementality isolates whether a channel caused conversions that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Attribution says where the credit goes. Incrementality says whether the credit is real.
Keep exploring
About New Rebellion
New Rebellion is a marketing intelligence consultancy. We build tools, score Australian businesses on how their marketing actually performs, and publish Debrief every day. This dictionary is part of how we work in the open.
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