Marketing attribution

Updated 2026-11-02

Definition

Marketing attribution is the practice of assigning credit for a sale to the marketing that helped cause it. It answers a plain question: which channels and campaigns brought in this revenue?

Attribution has three parts. You need a record of each person's visits, a record of what they paid, and a rule for splitting the payment across the visits. That rule is called an attribution model.

Example

This example uses made-up numbers. Sam finds your site through a Google search on May 1, comes back from your newsletter on May 8, and clicks a LinkedIn ad on May 12. Sam then pays $900.

• First-touch gives $900 to organic search.
• Last-touch gives $900 to paid social.
• Linear gives $300 to each of the three channels.
• U-shaped gives $360 to search, $180 to email and $360 to paid social.

The payment is the same in every case. Only the story changes, so compare models before you move budget.

What it can't see

Attribution only sees what your tracking sees. A podcast mention or a friend's recommendation usually shows up as a direct visit. That's why many teams pair tracked attribution with self-reported attribution.

How Headstream measures it

Headstream reads visits from a script on your site and payments from Stripe (connecting Stripe is in beta). It offers first-touch, last-touch, linear and U-shaped models. It runs attribution every hour and publishes a run only if the credits equal the payment ledger.

The marketing attribution guide covers this in depth, and revenue attribution shows the feature. The methodology page explains each calculation.