marketing attribution

Definition

The practice of determining which touchpoints deserve credit for a conversion, attempting to solve marketing's eternal question: 'Which half of my advertising is working?' Spoiler: there are no perfect answers.

Example Usage

Our multi-touch attribution model showed that social media assists conversions even though search gets the last click.

Origin

Digital analytics evolution in the 2000s as customer journeys became trackable across multiple channels.

Fun Fact

First-click, last-click, linear, time-decay—there are dozens of attribution models, each telling a different story about campaign effectiveness.

Source: Marketing analytics and measurement frameworks

Related Terms

Beginner

cost per thousand

The cost to deliver 1,000 ad impressions, abbreviated as CPM where 'M' is the Roman numeral for 1,000 because marketing loves needlessly confusing acronyms. It's the pricing model that treats eyeballs as commodities.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Advanced

ad exchange

A digital marketplace where publishers and advertisers buy and sell ad inventory in real-time through automated auctions. Imagine the New York Stock Exchange, but instead of trading equity in companies, you're trading the privilege of annoying someone with banner ads.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Intermediate

Persona

A fictional character representing your ideal customer, complete with a stock photo name and backstory more detailed than most Netflix characters. Marketing teams create them to feel like they understand their audience, then ignore them completely when making actual decisions.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Intermediate

marketing qualified lead

A prospect who's shown enough interest to warrant sales attention but hasn't quite committed, occupying that precious limbo between 'downloaded a whitepaper' and 'actually wants to talk to someone.' The marketing team's way of saying 'we've done our part, now it's your turn' to sales.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Beginner

virality

The Holy Grail metric measuring how quickly content spreads across the internet like a digital contagion. Every marketer dreams of achieving it, most fail miserably, and the few who succeed usually have no idea how it actually happened. It's basically controlled chaos with a fancy epidemiological name.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Beginner

Influencer

A person with a large social media following who gets paid to pretend they organically discovered your protein powder. The modern equivalent of a billboard, except billboards don't have existential crises about their engagement rates.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

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