The plain-English guide to marketing attribution

Marketing attribution is how you answer one deceptively simple question: which of your marketing efforts actually brought in the money?

What is marketing attribution?

Attribution is the practice of assigning credit for a sale to the marketing touchpoints that led to it. When a customer finds you through a Google search, clicks an ad a week later, then fills in a form and eventually buys, attribution decides how much credit each of those steps deserves.

Most analytics tools stop at the conversion— the form fill, the sign-up, the phone call. That's useful, but a conversion isn't revenue. Attribution done properly follows the thread all the way to the closed, paid deal.

Revenue vs. lead attribution

This is the distinction that changes how you spend. Two channels can produce the same number of leads while one quietly generates several times more revenue.

• Lead attribution tells you where your enquiries came from — clicks, form fills, and conversions.
• Revenue attribution tells you where your money came from — the booked, invoiced revenue each channel actually produced.

If you budget on leads alone, you'll happily pour money into the channel that fills your inbox with enquiries that never close — and starve the one quietly bringing in your best customers.

How attribution actually works

There are three moving parts:

• Capture the source. When a visitor first arrives, record how they got there — the channel, campaign or search that referred them.
• Identify the person. Tie that visit to a real contact when they submit an enquiry, so the source travels with them.
• Match to revenue. When that contact becomes a paying customer in your accounting system, connect the invoice back to the original source.

First-touch attribution

First-touch credits allof a deal's revenue to the very first channel a customer interacted with — the source that introduced them to your business. It's the model LeadSight uses today.

First-touch is powerful for one reason: it rewards the channels that create demand. If organic search is what first put you on a customer's radar, first-touch makes sure search gets the credit — even if the final click before purchase came from a branded ad or a direct visit.

Other attribution models

No single model is “correct” — each answers a slightly different question. These are on the LeadSight roadmap, so you'll be able to switch between them:

• Last-touch — credits the most recent channel before the purchase. Good for understanding what closes deals.
• Linear — splits credit evenly across every touchpoint on the journey. A balanced, whole-funnel view.
• Time-decay — weights credit toward the touchpoints closest to the sale, while still acknowledging earlier ones.

Attribution for service businesses

Here's the gap most tools never close. For service-based businesses, revenue doesn't appear at the moment of conversion — it lands days, weeks or months later when a deal closes and an invoice is paid. By then, standard analytics has long since lost the thread.

LeadSight is built for exactly this. It holds onto the original source until the money actually arrives, then reconnects the two — so you finally see which marketing earns real revenue, not just which fills the funnel.