Every Channel Wants Credit for the Sale. Only the Data Knows Who Actually Earned It.

What This Guide Covers

Demystifying the jargon-heaviest corner of analytics

Attribution has a reputation for being the most jargon-heavy corner of marketing analytics — multi-touch, last-click, data-driven models, none of it explained in a way a business owner actually needs. This guide demystifies it in plain language: how the different ways of crediting a channel actually differ, how to report the results in a way people actually read, and when a growing site's data has genuinely outgrown a standard dashboard.

Everything here assumes your underlying tracking is already sound — that's the prerequisite, and fixing it if it isn't is the foundation problem Audry's planned Server-Side Tracking service is meant to solve (see below; it isn't built yet).

The Method

The model you pick changes the story you tell

Last-click attribution gives 100% of the credit to whatever a customer clicked right before converting — simple, but it systematically erases every channel that did real work earlier in the journey: the social post that first made them aware, the search result that answered an early question, the retargeting ad that brought them back. Multi-touch models spread credit across the path instead of the finish line alone — more honest, genuinely more work to explain, and worth it the moment a real budget decision depends on getting the answer right.

The same honesty applies to how the data gets reported, not just how it's modeled. A report nobody reads is worthless regardless of how correct the attribution model behind it is — and the evidence is unglamorous but consistent: a short monthly report gets read; a long weekly one gets skimmed once and then ignored. Reporting cadence is itself a decision worth making deliberately, not a default nobody questions.

For an agency managing several sites, there's a further honest line to draw: what belongs on a client-facing report and what doesn't. White-label reporting done well shows the client real evidence, not a repackaged vanity metric — the same truth-on-the-page standard this whole library holds to.

Where Audry Picks Up

The foundation this pillar assumes

This pillar assumes your tracking is already correct — reading attribution data only works if the data itself is trustworthy in the first place. If it isn't, that's a foundation problem: Server-Side Tracking is the Audry service built to solve it, though it isn't built yet. Separately, for sites whose analytics have genuinely outgrown a standard dashboard, The Ultra (above) is ARIA's feature/pricing page into that capability — the full canonical explainer of the underlying infrastructure (also not built yet) is Audry's Data Warehouse.