An attribution model is a marketing term that refers to the way in which credit or blame is assigned to various channels for the success of a given marketing campaign. Attribution models are used to determine what channels are the most effective for any given campaign.
Different attribution models have different ways of assigning credit and blame. For example, if an online ad is shown to a user who then purchases a product from the company’s website, it may be said that 100% of the purchase was due to the online ad while 0% was due to word-of-mouth advertising. Another example would be that if an email campaign led someone to visit a company’s website and then purchase one of their products, it may be said that 50% of the purchase was due to email marketing while 50% was due to visiting their website.
While there are many different attribution models, some common ones include last click, first click, most recent click, linear attribution model (also called time decay