Attribution and its limits
Allocating credit is useful. Confusing credit with complete causality is expensive.
Attribution assigns credit for an outcome to marketing touchpoints under a rule or model. Google Analytics describes rule-based and data-driven approaches that distribute credit using the available journey information.[1] The resulting report is a lens on evidence, not a recording of every reason a person chose a business.
A simple distinction
Imagine someone hears a recommendation, sees an ad and later searches for the brand before enquiring. A report may show some of those interactions and miss others. Different attribution approaches can assign different credit while the underlying customer remains the same person. Changing the model does not itself create an additional customer.
Attribution and incrementality answer related but different questions. Attribution asks how credit is allocated. An incrementality investigation asks what outcomes would have happened without the intervention. A modelled attribution report is not automatically a substitute for a well-designed experiment addressing that counterfactual.
Compare with care
Before comparing platforms, check event definitions, time zones, date bases, attribution settings and counting units. Avoid adding separately attributed conversion totals and presenting the sum as unique customers. A customer can appear in more than one platform's report.
Use CRM outcomes to understand commercial progression while retaining the limitations of source capture. Multi-person buying groups and longer sales cycles can complicate a neat click-to-customer picture. Missing information should be acknowledged, not filled with a confident-looking assumption.
A useful reporting habit
Label the model and describe what the metric counts. Use attribution to develop hypotheses about the journey, then combine it with cohort analysis, sales evidence and appropriate experiments for bigger decisions.
The takeaway: ask what the chosen model helps you see and what it cannot resolve. A different lens can improve the view. It does not make the blind spots disappear.
Source
[1] Google Analytics: attribution ↗, reviewed 26 October 2026.