Attribution · Describe
Can we trust what we observe?
What happened, and how reliable is the evidence? Tracking loss, identity, consent, event definitions, funnel grain, and attribution as descriptive evidence. Everything downstream inherits the flaws you accept here.
The problem in one chart
Same quarter, same spend, same conversions. On the left, cost per acquisition as reported by last-touch. On the right, as measured against a holdout. Where the lines cross is where budget moves the wrong way.
Worked examples
Full analyses in this discipline, carried from the business decision through to a recommendation and an explicit account of what the result does not establish.
Lessons
Attribution Is Not Incrementality
Attribution assigns credit for conversions you observed. Incrementality estimates the ones that would not have happened otherwise. The gap between them is where budgets go wrong.
The Same Click, Different Funnels
One ad click means something different in a self-serve checkout than in a sales-qualified pipeline. The funnel it enters decides the unit, the window, and the outcome you are allowed to attribute it to.
What Multi-Touch Attribution Actually Computes
Seven credit rules run on the same journeys, from last touch to Markov chains and Shapley values, against the effects that generated them. What changes between rules, what does not, and why the sophisticated ones fail in the same place.
What Tracking Loss Actually Costs You
Consent refusal, identity resolution, and cross-device loss are not one problem. Separating loss that costs precision from loss that costs validity, and why only one of them is fixable with more data.
Defining Events That Survive Contact With Operations
A lead, an activation, and a qualified opportunity are organizational agreements before they are data. What happens to a time series when the agreement changes and nobody writes it down.
Reading Platform Discrepancies Without Losing Your Mind
Two systems report different numbers for the same campaign. Four causes account for nearly all of it, and checking them in the right order turns a week of investigation into an afternoon.
The machinery behind this
Lessons say how to answer the question once. These are the standing systems that answer it on a schedule, each built around the unit it is allowed to withhold.