--- title: "What is attribution in advertising? | AdBuyMCP" description: "Assigning credit for an outcome to the advertising touchpoints that preceded it, according to a rule the advertiser chose." url: "https://adbuymcp.com/glossary/attribution" --- [Home](https://adbuymcp.com/) / [Glossary](https://adbuymcp.com/glossary) / Attribution Measurement and evidence # What is attribution in advertising? Assigning credit for an outcome to the advertising touchpoints that preceded it, according to a rule the advertiser chose. It describes correlation in a conversion path, and it cannot show on its own that the advertising caused anything. [Get my plan and price](https://adbuymcp.com/start) [Book a 30-minute call with the founder](https://adbuymcp.com/contact#book) Free, with no card. We read your homepage, draft who buys from you and show your monthly price before you join the waitlist. Nothing is bought until you've approved the plan and the ads. What it means here ## Here is what the term means for a UK buyer The definition above holds anywhere. Buying media in the UK adds the detail below, including where AdBuyMCP does something different. The distinction between attribution and incrementality is the most consequential one in media measurement, and most reporting blurs it. AdBuyMCP keeps them under separate labels: observed covers outcomes on your own property matched to the campaign's immutable key, with an explicit note that it is correlation, and powered causal is reserved for a geo-lift result that passed its own power check. Two exclusions are enforced in code: the synthetic baseline series never inflates response counts, and nothing dated before the flight can count as a response to it. ## How does AdBuyMCP measure response? Response is read from analytics you already own, Plausible or GA4, through a token you supply, and matched to the campaign on an immutable UTM key. Promo codes, vanity URLs and pixel events count too. The response window opens at the flight start, so nothing that happened before the media ran is credited to it. The result carries the label observed: the response happened on a property you own and can audit, and it co-occurred with the campaign. ## When is attribution enough? Attribution is a good operating signal. It is consistent, cheap and available daily, which makes it useful for pacing a campaign and for spotting a broken landing page. Last-click, the most common rule, reliably favours search and retargeting, which sit closest to the conversion, over the channels that created the demand. When a budget decision depends on whether a channel was incremental, the evidence has to come from a powered test with a holdout. A campaign too small or too national to carry one should say so at planning time. Read next - [What the weekly report shows, and what your own numbers add Goes deeper](https://adbuymcp.com/measurement) - [The four channels in an awareness plan Channels](https://adbuymcp.com/channels) - [What UK awareness advertising costs Cost](https://adbuymcp.com/cost) - [Designing a geo-lift test that can actually be powered Guide](https://adbuymcp.com/guides/designing-a-geo-lift-test) Type your company website or work email to see who we think buys from you and what reaching them 3, 5 or 12 times a week would cost. [Get my plan and price](https://adbuymcp.com/start) Free, with no card. Related terms ## These terms sit next to this one Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next. - ### [Last-click attribution](https://adbuymcp.com/glossary#last-click) An attribution rule that gives all the credit for an outcome to the final advertising touchpoint before it, and none to the rest. Simple, universally available, and systematically biased towards whichever channel sits closest to the conversion. - ### [Incrementality](https://adbuymcp.com/glossary/incrementality) The share of an outcome that happened because of the advertising, measured against what would have happened anyway. It is measured by comparing an exposed group with a comparable unexposed one, which counting the conversions that followed an advert cannot do. - ### [CPA](https://adbuymcp.com/glossary#cpa) The cost of one completed action, whether that is a sale, a lead or a booking, calculated by dividing spend by the actions attributed to it. That makes it entirely dependent on the attribution model underneath. - ### [Evidence provenance](https://adbuymcp.com/glossary#provenance) A label attached to a number recording how it was produced, so anyone reading the number can see how strong the evidence behind it is. The number may be reported by the seller, observed on your own property, estimated by a model, or established by a powered experiment. Same group ## These terms are also in Measurement and evidence What you can prove afterwards, and how to tell a number that means something from one that does not. - [Geo-lift test](https://adbuymcp.com/glossary/geo-lift) - [Holdout](https://adbuymcp.com/glossary/holdout) - [Matched market](https://adbuymcp.com/glossary#matched-market) - [Difference-in-differences](https://adbuymcp.com/glossary#difference-in-differences) - [Statistical power](https://adbuymcp.com/glossary/statistical-power) - [Minimum detectable effect (MDE)](https://adbuymcp.com/glossary/minimum-detectable-effect) - [Marketing mix modelling (MMM)](https://adbuymcp.com/glossary/marketing-mix-modelling) - [Brand lift](https://adbuymcp.com/glossary/brand-lift) [All 81 terms](https://adbuymcp.com/glossary)