What is an attribution model?

An attribution model is the rule that decides how credit for a sale is divided among the marketing touches that led to it. A customer might click a Google ad, come back from an email, then buy after a branded search. The attribution model determines which of those touches gets the credit, and how much.

Common attribution models

• Last-click gives 100% of the credit to the final touch before the sale. Simple, but it flatters bottom-of-funnel channels like branded search and retargeting.
• First-click gives all the credit to the first touch, flattering top-of-funnel discovery instead.
• Linear splits credit evenly across every touch.
• Time-decay gives more credit to touches closer to the sale.
• Data-driven uses your own conversion patterns to assign fractional credit, which is more accurate but harder to explain.

Why it matters

No model is objectively correct; each answers a slightly different question. The danger is comparing numbers built on different models, which is why two tools reporting the same sales can show very different channel performance. What matters more than the model is that the underlying data is complete. If your tracking misses a third of conversions, no attribution model will save the report.

Trakt records every touch first-party and keeps the first source and last source separate, so you can see who won a customer and who closed them without one model hiding the other.