How attribution works

Attribution assigns credit to the marketing touchpoints that led to a conversion.

The attribution problem

A typical customer journey involves multiple touchpoints:

Question: Which channel gets credit for the sale?

Each model gives a different answer. None of them are correct.

TrustData's approach: data-driven attribution

TrustData uses Data-Driven attribution, which:

1. Considers all possible combinations of touchpoints
2. Calculates the marginal contribution of each touchpoint
3. Distributes credit fairly based on actual impact

Why data-driven?

Data-Driven attribution uses your actual conversion data to answer one question: what is each channel's fair share of the credit?

Total conversion value: $100

Without any marketing: $0 expected value
With Google only: $40 expected value
With Meta only: $30 expected value
With both: $100 (actual conversion)

Data-Driven calculation:
- Google's marginal contribution: ($40 - $0) + ($100 - $30) / 2 = $55
- Meta's marginal contribution: ($30 - $0) + ($100 - $40) / 2 = $45

Result: Google gets 55%, Meta gets 45%

This split is mathematically provable as the only fair way to distribute the credit.

The attribution pipeline

TrustData runs attribution daily:

1. Sessionization

TrustData groups events into sessions:

• 30-minute inactivity timeout
• New session on UTM change
• New session on referrer change

2. Path construction

TrustData builds each customer journey:

3. Data-driven calculation

For each conversion, TrustData calculates channel contributions with the Fractribution model.

4. Attribution table

TrustData stores the results in a table you can query:

Attribution dimensions

TrustData attributes credit at each of these levels:

Comparing to platform attribution

Why TrustData numbers differ from ad platform dashboards:

TrustData applies one model across every channel. Each ad platform grades its own work, and each grades generously.

Attribution product page on trustdata.tech · Free trial