What is Attribution Model?
Definition: A framework for assigning credit to marketing and sales touchpoints that influenced a conversion, determining which channels, campaigns, and interactions contributed to pipeline and revenue.
Attribution answers the question: what caused this deal? The prospect read a blog post, clicked an ad, received a cold email, attended a webinar, and then booked a demo. Which of those touchpoints deserves credit for the pipeline?
Common models: first-touch (blog post gets 100% credit), last-touch (demo request gets 100% credit), linear (each touchpoint gets equal credit), time-decay (recent touchpoints get more credit), and W-shaped (first touch, lead creation, and opportunity creation each get 30%, with 10% distributed across everything else).
For GTM Engineers, attribution data determines budget allocation. If cold email drives 40% of pipeline but only gets 10% of the budget, the data makes the case for more investment in outbound. If a webinar series consistently appears in the conversion path but gets cut from the budget, attribution data saves it.
The hard truth: perfect attribution doesn't exist. Dark social (someone recommends your product in a Slack channel) is invisible to tracking. Self-reported attribution ("How did you hear about us?") contradicts click-based attribution 30-50% of the time. GTM Engineers build the best attribution system they can while acknowledging its limits. Use it for directional decisions, not precise accounting.