Analytics & Attribution
Every Channel Wants Credit for the Sale. Only the Data Knows Who Actually Earned It.
Attribution isn't about picking a favorite model — it's about reading the whole path a customer actually took, honestly, instead of handing the last click all the credit it didn't earn alone.
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 it's Audry's foundation to fix if it isn't (see below).
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.
In This Guide
Analytics & Attribution
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Multi-Touch vs. Last-Click, Plainly Explained
Demystifying attribution models without the vendor jargon.
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Reporting Cadence That Actually Gets Read
Why monthly beats weekly, and why short beats long.
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White-Label Reporting, Done Honestly
What actually belongs on a white-label report, for agencies managing more than one site.
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The Ultra: When Your Data Outgrows a Dashboard
For sites whose data has genuinely outgrown a standard dashboard's scale.
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, and it's Audry's to fix: Server-Side Tracking. 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 lives with Audry: Data Warehouse.
See your own attribution, plainly
Stop guessing which channel actually earned the credit. Connect your site and let ARIA read your real customer journeys — and report them in a way that's actually worth reading.