Attribution

A customer sees an ad on Instagram, searches for your name on Google a week later and orders after a newsletter. All three channels played a part, but the analytics tool has to decide how the sale is counted. The rules for that are called attribution models.

In Google Ads, data-driven attribution is the default. It shares out the credit based on the data in your own account. The other option is last click, which gives all the credit to the click just before the sale. Google removed the first click, linear, time decay and position-based models from both Google Ads and Google Analytics in 2023.

Every platform counts itself first

Each platform prefers to count its own contribution. Meta and Google can both claim the same sale, and together report more sales than you actually had. If you only look at the last click, you can also end up cutting a channel that did its work early in the customer journey.

One simple check

Add up the sales the ad platforms report for last month, and compare with what you actually sold according to your accounts or till system. If the total is higher than reality, you know the channels are sharing the credit. Tag your links with UTM parameters, and you have one shared place to see where your customers came from.