What is Marketing Attribution?

What is Marketing Attribution

Marketing attribution is the process of determining which marketing touchpoints influenced a customer to convert. It helps brands understand what’s driving sales, optimize media spend, and improve ROI. With channels like podcasts, influencers, and CTV harder to track, modern attribution goes beyond clicks—combining data, models, and customer feedback to see the full picture.

Why Marketing Attribution Matters

In today’s fragmented marketing landscape, consumers engage with brands across multiple touchpoints—social, email, influencers, podcasts, direct mail, and more. Attribution helps you:

• Understand which channels drive revenue

• Justify spend on upper-funnel or awareness tactics

• Optimize campaign performance

• Align marketing strategy with real customer behavior

Yet traditional attribution tools often miss the mark—especially when it comes to hard-to-measure channels like podcasts or TV. That’s where modern tools like Fairing come in.

Common Attribution Models (and Their Flaws)

1. Last-Touch Attribution

Gives all the credit to the final touchpoint before conversion. Simple but misleading—ignores the rest of the customer journey.

2. First-Touch Attribution

Credits the first interaction. Great for awareness, but doesn’t reflect what truly influenced the conversion.

3. Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)

Distributes credit across multiple touchpoints. More nuanced but relies heavily on deterministic tracking—which breaks down on iOS, TV, and podcasts.

4. Media Mix Modeling (MMM)

A statistical model used to estimate channel impact. Requires a lot of historical data and can’t offer granular, real-time insights.

Why Attribution Is Broken for Hard-to-Measure Channels

• Podcasts, influencers, direct mail, CTV, and OOH are notoriously difficult to track with pixels or UTMs.

• Privacy changes (like iOS 14+) have made click-based attribution less reliable.

• Attribution software often ignores qualitative data—like what customers say influenced them.

That’s why top brands are adding direct-from-the-source methods like post-purchase surveys to their stack.

Why Fairing Helps

Fairing’s Post-Purchase Surveys unlock attribution where other tools fail.

• Capture self-reported attribution data—direct from your customers at the moment of truth.

• Measure upper-funnel and offline channels like podcasts, TV, influencer, direct mail, and OOH.

• Quantify awareness and intent with data that doesn’t rely on cookies or clicks.

• Real-time insights with open-text and multiple-choice surveys you can analyze immediately.

• Flexible, fast, and accurate—our customers launch attribution surveys in hours, not weeks.

Fairing customers use post-purchase data alongside tools like Google Analytics or Rockerbox to round out the full attribution picture.

How to Calculate Attribution (Without Getting Burned by Pixels)

Attribution isn’t always a formula—it’s a framework. But here are a few ways brands quantify it:

Self-Reported Attribution

Ask your customers: “How did you hear about us?” Then analyze responses by channel and match against sales data.

UTM-Based Attribution

Use URL parameters to track digital clicks. But be cautious—this fails with podcasts, TV, and dark social.

Hybrid Attribution

Combine quantitative (clickstream) and qualitative (survey) data to build a fuller story. Fairing makes this easy by piping survey data into your analytics and BI tools.

Best Practices for Better Attribution

• Survey every customer post-purchase to gather qualitative data at scale.

• Tag responses consistently to normalize insights across channels.

• Use benchmarks to compare awareness and performance across cohorts.

• Build feedback loops into your media buying process.

👉 Ready to see what’s really working? Get started with Fairing