What is attribution in marketing? A guide for modern marketers

Proving marketing’s impact has never been harder—or more critical. Leadership wants answers. Sales wants leads. Finance wants to know why budgets are going up. And you’re stuck explaining why that 500% increase in impressions isn’t translating into revenue.

If you’ve ever hit your KPIs—leads, engagement, clicks—only to have leadership question your actual contribution to revenue, you’re not alone.

The reason: Traditional marketing attribution models, especially those built on last-click or short-term metrics, can’t keep up with how modern buyers behave. The old playbook doesn’t cut it anymore. Here’s why.

Meaning of attribution in marketing

Attribution in marketing is the identification of efforts that influence consumer shopping behavior and drive business outcomes such as generating leads, making sales, or increasing customer retention.

Note: Attribution doesn’t just track paid ads or media buys. Modern attribution in digital marketing considers your entire marketing ecosystem, including:

• Paid advertising (search ads, display, social ads, programmatic)
• Content marketing (blogs, whitepapers, case studies)
• Email campaigns (newsletters, nurture sequences)
• Webinars and events (virtual or in-person)
• Organic social media (LinkedIn, Instagram, X)
• SEO (website traffic, keyword strategies)
• Community engagement (Slack groups, Discord channels)
• Partnerships and affiliates

When done right, marketing attribution gives you a clear view of how each channel, campaign, or tactic contributes to pipeline and revenue. It connects the dots between your team’s work and the outcomes your business cares about.

What is the purpose of attribution?

The purpose of attribution is to help you make smarter marketing investment decisions. Without understanding attribution, you risk over-investing in channels that look good on paper (like paid search) and ignoring the slower burns that build lasting growth (like events or thought leadership).

Attribution in digital marketing exists to: 

1. Allocate your marketing budget based on what’s driving results

Stop relying on your marketing instincts to decide where to spend your next dollar. Attribution shows you which channels are delivering results so you can double down—and cut what’s underperforming.

2. Prove marketing’s value to the business

Brand attribution ties your marketing efforts to business outcomes like revenue, pipeline growth, customer acquisition, and retention. It shifts the conversation from “here is what we did” to “here is the impact we made.”

Read more: How to forecast revenue and demonstrate marketing ROI

3. Optimize the customer journey

Which touchpoints build trust? Which ones accelerate conversions? Attribution in marketing helps you refine the customer experience so you’re not just attracting leads—you’re closing them. 

4. Balance bottom-of-funnel media performance with brand-building for long-term growth

It’s easy to focus on media attribution—clicks and quick conversions. But sustainable growth comes from understanding how brand-building, content, and community work together over time. Attribution in marketing keeps both in view.

Read more: Performance marketing vs brand marketing: What’s the difference?

The challenges of marketing channel attribution

Brand attribution isn’t just a data challenge—it’s a mindset challenge. Many teams are stuck in outdated thinking and reporting cycles that don’t reflect how people actually buy today.

In fact, according to the Report of Marketing Attribution 2024, only 28% of marketers consider their attribution strategies successful in achieving strategic objectives. 

Here are the marketing attribution challenges holding teams back:

1. Last-click bias

Most attribution models give all the credit to the last interaction before conversion. It’s simple, but dangerously misleading. Last-click ignores everything that came before—awareness, consideration, trust-building. 

2. Short-term thinking

Standard attribution windows (14- or 30-day lookbacks) favor tactics that convert fast. But they miss the long game. Thought leadership, SEO, and brand-building often take months to influence a decision—and they don’t get the credit they deserve.

The problem? If attribution models undervalue these efforts, marketers have little incentive to keep funding them. And that’s risky. The Multiplier Effect report shows that a balanced mix of performance and brand marketing can create an ROI lift of 25-100%. 

But if you’re only tracking short-term wins, you’ll end up starving the very attribution strategies that drive long-term pipeline and revenue growth.

3. Siloed attribution data and blind spots

Most attribution models focus on channels that are easy to track—paid ads, email clicks, website visits. But what about the channels that don’t fit neatly into those systems?

PR, podcasts, influencer partnerships, and community building often live in separate silos. They’re harder to measure, so they don’t show up in your attribution reports. That makes it easy to undervalue them, even though they’re critical to your funnel in building trust.

Read more: The best marketing channel performance metrics

4. Complex customer journeys

Buyers don’t follow a straight line anymore. They zig-zag across platforms, channels, and devices. One day, they’re reading your blog; next month, they’re attending your webinar. And weeks later, they’re closing after hearing about you on a podcast. Old-school attribution can’t keep up.

When your marketing channel attribution model can’t account for these non-linear paths, you end up with blind spots that skew your data—and your decisions. In fact, the State of Marketing Attribution report shows the leading difficulty in implementing attribution is the complexities of multiple marketing campaign attribution and customer journeys. 

Read more: The ultimate guide to building a unified marketing strategy

What attribution model approach is mainly used in marketing

Understanding marketing attribution models helps you become aware of the blind spots you’re still dealing with. Some models are helpful for specific goals (like tactical optimization), but none are enough on their own to guide strategic decisions. The top five attribution models are:

Marketing attribution model	How it works	Best for	Limitations
First-touch	100% credit to the first interaction	Top-of-funnel insights	Ignores later interactions that lead to conversion
Last-touch	100% credit to the last interaction	Measuring bottom-funnel conversions	Misses early and mid-funnel influence
Linear (multi-touch)	Equal credit to all touchpoints	Broad view of all interactions	Oversimplifies by treating all touchpoints as equally important
Time decay	More credit to recent touchpoints, less to earlier ones	Fast sales cycles, recent activity focus	Undervalues early-stage awareness and brand-building efforts
Position-based (U-shaped)	40% to first and last touch, 20% shared among middle interactions	Longer sales cycles needing balance	Assumes all journeys are similar, leading to arbitrary weighting

With the overview in mind, here’s a deeper dive into how these attribution models actually play out in practice.

1. First-touch attribution

This model gives 100% of the credit to the first interaction a customer has with your brand. That might be a social ad, a webinar, an organic search click, or a tradeshow visit.

Use the first-touch attribution model when you need to:

• Figure out what’s working at the top of the funnel
• See what’s creating initial awareness

This model falls short and:

• Completely ignores everything that happens after someone becomes aware of you
• Doesn’t credit the work your nurture sequences, sales reps, or remarketing campaigns did to close the deal
• Works best for simple sales cycles, but not for B2B or high-consideration purchases.

Takeaway: First-touch attribution gives you a sense of who opened the door—but not who made the sale.

2. Last-touch attribution

This model gives all the credit to the last touchpoint before conversion—usually a Google search, retargeting ad, or direct visit to your site.

Use the last-touch attribution model when you need to:

• Identify bottom-of-funnel performance
• Quickly measure which marketing attribution channels are driving immediate conversions
• Report on easy-to-track metrics without complex modeling

This model falls short and:

• Ignores the middle and top of the funnel, where the relationship and trust are built
• Leads to over-investing in channels that are already harvesting demand (branded search)
• Encourages a short-term mindset that focuses on quick wins instead of building sustainable growth

Takeaway: Last-touch attribution tells you who crossed the finish line, but not who ran the race. You can’t build a full-funnel marketing strategy around that.

3. Linear attribution (multi-touch)

This model gives equal credit to every touchpoint along the customer journey, no matter how many there are.

Use the liner attribution model when you need to:

• Get a full view of every channel that had a role in the conversion
• Spread credit fairly across the journey

This multi-touch attribution model falls short and:

• Assumes every touchpoint is equally important, which isn’t true. For example, opening a newsletter and booking a demo call shouldn’t carry the same weight.
• Oversimplifies complex customer journeys. In reality, buyers don’t follow a neat, linear path. They jump between channels, take breaks, and revisit content over weeks or months. Equal credit to every touchpoint will mislead you into thinking all interactions are driving the same level of impact.

Takeaway: Linear attribution data is “fair” as it assigns equal credit to each touchpoint—but it’s not accurate. It treats every action the same, no matter its real impact.

4. Time decay attribution

This model follows a decay function, which means the credit decreases exponentially the further a touchpoint is from the conversion. In simple words, more credit is assigned to touchpoints closer to the conversion, with earlier interactions getting less weight. There’s no universal percentage rule assigned in the time decay attribution data model. It depends on the:

• Decay curve used (often exponential decay)
• Time gap between each touchpoint and the conversion

Use the time decay attribution model when you need to:

• Highlight what’s working now and what leads directly to conversions
• Work on fast sales cycles, like e-commerce or low-consideration products

• Reward channels that close quickly
• Prioritize recent activity that nudges a buyer over the line

This model falls short and:

• Undervalues brand awareness, education, and nurture programs—the long plays that often create the demand in the first place

Takeaway: Time decay attribution rewards fast wins, but risks starving the top of the funnel where demand is built.

5. Position-based attribution (U-shaped)

This model gives 40% credit to the first touchpoint and 40% to the last, splitting the remaining 20% across the middle interactions.

Use the position-based attribution model when you need to:

• Emphasize both lead generation and conversion efforts.
• Recognize the importance of who found the leads first and who closed them out.
• Work on longer sales cycles, where you want to credit both demand gen and conversion channels

This model falls short because:

• The 40/40/20 split is arbitrary—there’s no science behind it.
• Every customer journey is different. This model treats them all the same.
• It ignores interaction effects, where channels work together (for example, your social media posts could be making search ads more effective).

Takeaway: U-shaped attribution is a compromise model. It’s better than nothing, but it’s still just guesswork.

Read more: MMM vs MTA: The differences between marketing mix modeling and multi-touch attribution

Why marketing attribution models aren’t enough anymore

Most marketing attribution software gives you a limited view. They show where to assign credit—but not what’s really driving growth. Here’s what you’re missing if you rely on traditional attribution alone:

Incrementality

You need to know what wouldn’t have happened without your marketing efforts. Traditional models can’t answer that. They measure what did happen but not what’s incremental.

Without marketing incrementality measurement, you might be wasting your budget on campaigns that aren’t actually moving the needle. This is what incremental attribution looks like: 

Omnichannel marketing effects 

Basic attribution models can’t capture how your channels lift each other. That means you’re probably undervaluing brand and upper-funnel work that makes everything else perform better.

As Jesse Math from Keen puts it:

“The most important channels that influence consumer behavior are often the last to be funded—because they’re the hardest to measure.”

Long-term impact

Most models focus on short-term conversions and not scenario-based marketing conversions. But what about pipeline growth three, six, or twelve months from now? If you’re only looking at immediate wins, you’re missing the long game.

For example, Keen’s MMM platform helps you stimulate scenarios based on your marketing actions.

Picking the right marketing attribution solution for your team

So, how do you pick the right marketing attribution model? Short answer: it depends on your:

• Sales cycle length: Short sales cycles (like ecommerce) typically focus on quick conversions and simple journeys. On the other hand, longer, complex cycles (like B2B or high-ticket products) involve many online and offline touchpoints.
• Online vs. offline marketing channel mix: If most of your customer journey is digital, you might not need a complex model.
• Data availability: With cookie deprecation and privacy regulations, getting reliable user-level data is harder.
• Accuracy of insights you need: Simpler models like first-touch or last-touch won’t provide in-depth knowledge of your marketing funnel and how consumers are moving through it.

Use the table below to match your situation to the best-fit model.

Your situation	Best-fit marketing attribution model	Why it works
Short sales cycle, mostly online (ecommerce or lead generation)	Last-touch or time decay	Simple to implement, captures the conversion channels
Complex, long sales cycles with multiple stakeholders (B2B or high-ticket purchases)	Marketing mix modeling (MMM) along with multi-touch attribution measurement	Accounts for multiple touchpoints, balances early and late interactions
A mix of online and offline channels, need for cross-channel optimization insights	MMM with incrementality measurement	Measures true incremental impact across online/offline campaigns
Limited data availability and facing privacy restrictions	MMM	Works without user-level data, compliant with privacy regulations

Rethink your marketing attribution strategy—and measure what really matters with Keen

If you want to know what’s really driving growth, you need a different approach than just attribution software. 

Enter marketing mix modeling (MMM). It gives you a top-down view of how all channels work together and shows you where to allocate budget for maximum return.

That’s exactly what Keen’s MMM platform delivers. It helps marketers move beyond credit assignment and toward causal, data-driven decision-making. See exactly where to invest for the biggest impact—without relying on outdated attribution models or user-level tracking.

Ready to rethink your attribution in marketing? Request a demo to see how Keen helps marketers like you prove what’s working, where to spend next, and how to drive long-term growth.