Attribution Basics: How to Work Out What Is Actually Driving Sales

A lot of marketing decisions are made without a clear understanding of what is driving results.

Not because people do not care, but because attribution feels complicated, technical or time-consuming. So instead, decisions get made on instinct. Or habit. Or whatever felt busy or visible last quarter.

That is how businesses end up doing a bit of everything and never quite knowing what works.

Attribution does not need to be perfect to be useful. But it does need to exist.

At its simplest, attribution is about understanding where results come from. Which activity contributes to leads. Which channels influence sales. Which touchpoints show up consistently in the customer journey.

Without that understanding, marketing strategy becomes guesswork.

In the webinar, we talked about the importance of starting with performance data before doing anything else. Before launching new campaigns. Before adding new channels. Before rewriting strategy documents.

Look back first.

That means pulling together what you already have. Sales data. Website analytics. Paid media performance. Event response. CRM records. Even notes from conversations your sales team is having.

You are not looking for absolute certainty. You are looking for patterns.

Where do leads tend to come from?
Which channels appear early in the journey?
What shows up just before a sale?

Those answers shape strategy far more than opinions ever will.

One of the most common problems we see is businesses confusing activity with impact. A channel might feel busy. It might generate impressions, clicks or engagement. But if it rarely appears anywhere near a sale, it should be questioned.

This is where attribution helps you decide where to play.

If social media consistently shows up before leads convert, that matters. If events lead to conversations that later turn into orders, that matters. If print activity never appears in the journey at all, that matters too.

Attribution also helps you decide what to stop doing.

Strategy is as much about choosing what not to do as it is about choosing what to focus on. Without data, those decisions are uncomfortable. With data, they become much easier to defend.

A useful way to think about this is from a competitor’s perspective.

If a competitor had full visibility of where your sales come from, where would they invest? Which channels would they double down on? Which would they ignore?

That is the decision your strategy should be making.

Another mistake businesses make is assuming attribution requires complex models or expensive tools. It does not. In many cases, simple correlation is enough to guide better decisions.

For example, looking at branded search over time can tell you a lot about awareness. If more people are actively searching for your brand year on year, something is working. If that number is flat or declining, you may have a visibility problem, even if other metrics look healthy.

Event attribution is another area often written off as too difficult. But it does not have to be. Tracking conversations, follow-ups, reorders and even post-event website traffic can all build a clearer picture over time.

The goal is progress, not perfection.

Attribution also protects you from being distracted by vanity metrics. High impressions or reach might look impressive, but they mean very little without context. Click-through rates, cost per lead, conversion rates and sales data tend to tell a much more useful story.

Different objectives require different metrics. A lead generation campaign should be judged differently to a revenue-focused campaign. Attribution helps keep those distinctions clear.

One final point we discussed was time.

Many teams say they do not have time to analyse data properly. In reality, the time is usually being spent reacting to the wrong signals.

Even a high-level review can be valuable. Why did we do this activity? What were we trying to achieve? Did it deliver against that objective?

If you are short on time, start there.

Technology also helps. Modern platforms make data far more accessible than they used to. And AI tools can now assist with analysis, provided they are used responsibly and with the right controls in place.

But tools are secondary. The mindset comes first.

If you do not understand where your results come from, strategy will always feel uncertain. You will always be tempted by the next idea or channel.

Attribution gives strategy something solid to stand on.

It turns marketing from opinion-led to evidence-led. And that shift alone can change the quality of decisions a business makes.